Amy Appleford, Associate Professor and Department Chair
Amy Appleford specializes in late medieval religious writing, urban and civic literature and culture, the history of the body, women’s literary cultures, visionary writing, reformation writing, the history of the book, and medieval and sixteenth-century drama.
Micah Goodrich, Assistant Professor
Micah Goodrich’s research explores the triangulation among nature, temporality, and (re)production to formulate a premodern trans theology of embodiment. Professor Goodrich considers how the cultural power of nature is invoked by medieval institutions to control embodiment, specifically the body’s power to create and transform.
Erin Murphy, Associate Professor
Erin Murphy’s research and teaching interests center on the intersection of literature and politics, with primary areas of focus in seventeenth-century English literature, and gender and sexuality studies more broadly.
Christopher Martin’s scholarly work in European Renaissance literature has come to focus particularly on age studies or “literary gerontology”: how old age was understood, misunderstood, and depicted in early modernity, amid the intergenerational politics that shaped period attitudes. An abiding interest in lyric poetry informs his work and his most recent research has taken up the self-conscious gendering that shapes early modern poetry’s lyric performativity and he is currently exploring how male English poets of the seventeenth century found themselves obliged to conceive their art’s “masculine line” anew in the presence of an emerging company of publishing female writers, whose rich accomplishments he examines more exclusively in his course on early modern women authors.
James Siemon’s research, teaching, and publications concentrate on the literature of early modern England, with particular focus on drama, especially by Shakespeare. He is interested in social history and theory, and especially in the socio-linguistic interaction between early modern literature and practical, everyday discourse.
Swen Voekel, Clinical Associate Professor
Swen Voekel has taught a broad range of courses on ancient, medieval, and Renaissance literature, as well as (more recently) courses on Holocaust history and literature. He has published articles on the English Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser and is completing a book that examines the theme of hospitality in epic literature from Homer to Milton.