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Barbara
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In the more than twenty years since I did my graduate work at Brown University under the mentorship of Barbara Keifer Lewalski and the late Rosalie Colie, I have sought to extend my study of the central trope of early modern European literature, that of "re-naissance" or rebirth, from an understanding of the self-conscious literary investigation of sources and the historiographic models they imply, to an investigation of the often-less-conscious gendered, affective and material sources of production. My early book, Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy, was itself a proto-feminist effort proceeding out of my work in graduate school. In it I followed the critical practice of tracking the line of western European epic from Homer into the modern period by tracing the permutations of a single major structural episode. However, unlike the work of my predecessors in this critical genre which stressed more progressively structured episodes--Robert Durling in his work on the figure of the poet, Thomas Greene with his focus on the heavenly messenger, A. Bartlett Giamatti with his dwelling on the image of the garden, Andrew Fichter with his attention to dynastic marriage, my work focused on the haunting and recursive figure of the abandoned woman--Medea, Dido, Augustine's concubine, Dante's Francesca--as the repressed source of the new poet's creativity. I ended that book with an extended consideration of Shakespeare's Cleopatra and her alchemical transformation--so nostalgic of the Elizabethan golden age from within the patriarchal Romanism of the new reign of James I--of defeat by the Roman Empire. I completed this book during my tenure as Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1976-82), and refined it to production during my year as a junior fellow in the Cornell Society for the Humanities (1982-83). By that time I narrowed my teaching focus somewhat from the sweeping Great Books and European Renaissance courses which I had chiefly taught at Michigan toward various topical courses in Shakespeare and his contemporaries up through the English Civil War. During my year as a Mellon Fellow at Harvard University (1983- 84) I completed an early article in the feminist project to obtain a gendered understanding of the genre system, "Mixed Gender, Mixed Genre in Shakespeare's As You Like It," and I developed a graduate course which I have since taught in various redactions on "The Gynecology of the Text: Textual/Sexual Production in Elizabethan Literature." In it I typically begin with the problematic court- centered literary production of Sidney and Spenser, writing under an exceptional female ruler, and then pivot on the idealizing and self-recriminating sonnet production of the 1590s to expose the ambiguous creative conditions for theatrical production under both Elizabeth and James. My published articles on "Dido" for The Spenser Encyclopedia and on "'The Chief Knot of All the Discourse': The Maternal Subtext Tying Sidney's Arcadia to Shakespeare's King Lear" indicate some of the directions of this ongoing research. This work on the gynecology of the text frames my teaching of Shakespeare, Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama, and English Renaissance Literature in both our undergraduate and graduate curricula. I've been welcomed by the circle of theoretically inflected Shakespeareans and early modernists here at Buffalo, where there is both a two-semester undergraduate Shakespeare requirement that I teach with great regularity as "'The heart of my mystery': Authority, Power, and Sexuality" in which I emphasize the gendered, libidinal and material as well as the literary sources of Shakespeare's production, and a very active and productive early modernist section of our graduate program. In our graduate program I have taught and will continue to teach more topical versions of courses on Shakespeare, court-centered literary production, and the range of dramatic literature. In the summer of 1996 I was--together with several other university professors, professional actors, and master high-school teachers--a faculty member in the long-standing NEH summer Institute on "Teaching Shakespeare" at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., where UB is an institute member. I have imported many of the dramatic and media-centered techniques which I learned during the Institute into my regular teaching, and have also taught and plan to teach again a cross- listed undergraduate and graduate course in "Teaching Shakespeare," and have begun an outreach program employing these techniques in our local high schools. I have also regularly encouraged my graduate students to take advantage of the grant-in-aid and additional seminar offerings available to us through our membership in the Folger Institute: to date we have sent over a dozen graduate students to study at the Library. My work-in-progress centers around various draft article-length pieces toward a book which would situate specific Shakespearean plays in the dramatic production of a given year or cluster of years, amid a larger argument for the very conditions of drama in the period and its movement toward the revolutionary new configuration of political power discussed by Franco Moretti in his seminal work on "the deconsecration of sovereignty." Sections in draft include "The Cult of Elizabeth and the Production of Elizabethan Literature," (a topic on which I have lectured at several other institutions) which begins with the marriage debates that influenced literary production during the first half of Elizabeth's reign and were sublimated into a cult of fetishized virginity during the second half and concludes with a treatment of John Lyly's Endymion and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream; "Constructing Power From Above and Below," which considers Shakespeare's second tetralogy of history plays in terms of Galenic humoral physiology and Thomas Dekker's contemporaneous The Shoemakers' Holiday; "The Birth of Tragedy" which analyzes Julius Caesar and Hamlet in light of the Essex affair; "'Disjecta membra'" which examines plays by Ben Jonson and Beaument and Fletcher as alternate representations of tensions within the Jacobean body politic; and "His-teria" which looks at Shakespeare's later tragedies and romances in light of fears of feminine power, witchcraft, and radical antinomianism. I have been aided in the preparation for this work by my regular participation in the annual meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America, where in 1994 I organized a double seminar on "The Dramatic Origins of the English Revolution." I have been helped in this work by many productive graduate and undergraduate students over the years. Some of the graduate students for whom I have served as mentor include--from my time at Michigan--Susan Cerasano of Colgate University, Theresa Krier of Notre Dame University, Janis Butler Holm of Ohio University, Kimberley Devlin of the University of California, Riverside, and Celia Easton of SUNY Geneseo, and from my time at UB, Howard Marchitello of Texas A&M University, Olga Valbuena of Wake Forest University, Casey Charles of The University of Montana, Tracey Sedinger of Northern Colorado State University, Catherine Gray of the University of Illinois, Ubana-Champaign and Bradley Greenburg of Northeastern Illinois University at Chicago; undergraduate students of mine in recent years have gone on successfully to Ph.D. programs at the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, Iowa University, the University of Nebraska, and Yale University. At Michigan I received the "Class of '23" alumni award for outstanding undergraduate teaching (1981), and since coming to Buffalo I have received both the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching (1989) and the Milton Plesur Undergraduate Student Award for Excellence in Teaching (1992-93; 2001-02). Since coming to Buffalo I have also participated in several major administrative projects on both departmental and university levels. From 1985 to 1989 I was Director of Graduate Admissions and Fellowships; from 1993 to 1995 Associate Chair, and from 1996-1999 Director of the Master's Program. From 1988 to 1990 I chaired the university-wide Curriculum Committee that reformed our undergraduate general education requirements; from 1995 to 1997 I co-chaired the university-wide Sesquicentennial Committee that oversaw that 18-month celebration, including helping to organize all departmental academic programming and its major academic symposium, "Does the Body Matter?," which brought together six major speakers from neuro- and cognitive science, anthropology, and literary studies. From 1999-01 I was Chair of the English Department, and since 1993 I have been the President of the UB chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
Publications
1996: Review of Katharine Eisaman Maus's Inwardness and Theater in
the English Renaissance, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England,
10 (1996), 352-58. This site is maintained by Sophia Canavos. Return to the English Department
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