Members

Graduate Student Coordinator, 2022-2023:

Graduate Student Members:

  • Megan Behrend (English)
  • Laurel Billings (English and Women’s Studies)
  • Hannah Bredar (English)
  • Katharine Campbell (History of Art)
  • Sheila Coursey (English)
  • Anthony Gillum (English)
  • Jeremy Glover (English)
  • Emmamarie Haasl (History)
  • Anne Heminger (School of Music)
  • Persephone Rose Hernandez-Vogt (Romance Languages)
  • Rebecca Hixon (English)
  • Nicholas Holterman (Romance Languages)
  • Rebecca Huffman (English)
  • Dawn Kaczmar (English)
  • Margo Kolenda-Mason (English)
  • Michaela Kotziers (English)
  • Aidyn Osgood (History and Women’s Studies)
  • Annika Pattenaude (English)
  • Laura Romaine (English)
  • Emily Shearer (English)
  • Helena Skorovsky (Romance Languages)
  • Tonhi Lee (English)
  • Erin Johnson (History)
  • Robyn Thum-O’Brien (English)
  • Sydney Owada (English)
  • Taylor Sims (History)
  • Lindsey Wedow (English)
  • David Williams (English)
  • Sandra Williams (History of Art)

Faculty Director: Michael Schoenfeldt (English) – mcschoen@umich.edu

  • The John R. Knott, Jr. Collegiate Professor of English, Michael Schoenfeldt is the author of Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton and has edited two Cambridge companions. With interests in Renaissance literature, history, and medicine, gender and cultural studies, and religious studies, he has taught various classes in the English department and has published numerous articles.

Faculty:

Celeste Brusati (History of Art, Women’s Studies) – cbrusati@umich.edu

  • A professor of the history of art, Brusati holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Women’s Studies and the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design. Her scholarship centers on European art and art literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a focus on the pictorial arts in the Netherlands. Much of her work deals with problems of pictorial representation and perception, visual and literary reflections on art in the Netherlands, and the role of pictorial images in the making of seventeenth century Dutch culture. She is the author of Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1995) and Johannes Vermeer (1993) and has written on still life, self-imagery, perspective, trompe l’oeil illusionism, and value. In 2012 she curated Flip your Field: 20th Century Abstract Prints from the Collection at the UM Museum of Art. Current projects include editing the first English translation of Samuel van Hoogstraten’s painting treatise, Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst of 1678, to be published by the Getty Research Institute. She is also writing a book, provisionally titled Seeing in Pictures: Paradox and Paradigm in Dutch Art, which considers the artistic and theoretical implications of Dutch still life and genre paintings that reflect on the paradoxes of art and visual perception.

Linda Gregerson (English) – gregerso@umich.edu

  • Linda Gregerson is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. She is the editor, with Susan Juster, of Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic (Philadelphia, 2011) and author of The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge, 1995), as well as six books of poetry and a volume of essays on the contemporary American lyric. Her essays on Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Wyatt, and Jonson appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association), ELH (English Literary History), Milton Studies, Criticism, Spenser Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, and The Cambridge Companion to Spenser.

William Ingram (English, Comparative Literature) – ingram@umich.edu

  • Professor Ingram is best known in this country and abroad as one of the preeminent historians of the Elizabethan theatre, having gained this reputation through numerous articles in leading journals and two highly regarded books: A London Life in the Brazen Age. Francis Langley, 1548-1602 (Harvard University Press, 1978) and The Business of Playing: the beginnings of the adult professional theatre in Elizabethan London (Cornell University Press, 1992). He is co-editor of the volume England, 1530-1640 in the series The Theatre in Europe. Documents and Sources, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Professor Ingram’s scholarship is characterized by painstaking research in primary sources, mastery of the social and economic contexts of the Elizabethan theatre, and an imaginative grasp of the lives of those involved in the making and performance of the drama.

Peggy McCracken (Romance Languages, Comparative Literature, Women’s Studies) – peggymcc@umich.edu

  • McCracken’s teaching and research interests are, broadly defined, in the intersections of medieval literature, history, and theory. Her most recent book, In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France, explores relations of dominion and mastery as represented through human-animal interactions. In earlier projects she has studied the intersections of medieval theories and practices of queenship with romances about adulterous queens, and the ways in which gendered cultural values are mapped onto representations of blood. She has also collaborated with colleagues to write books on Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France. Other books focus on Barlaam and Josaphat, a widely circulating medieval saint’s life based on the life of the Buddha, and is currently at work on Ovidian Ecologies, a study of medieval translations of stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Steven Mullaney (English) – mullaney@umich.edu

  • He is the author of The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare (Chicago, 2015) and The Place of the Stage:  License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (1988 & 1994). He has also published essays about theater and reformation history, John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs , the impact of the “discovery” of the Americas on French, Italian, Spanish, and English cultures, the ideology of the object in the rationalization of empire, publics and counter-publics in reformation Europe, and the history of social emotions. From 2005 to 2010, he was a founding member and co-participant in “Making Publics:  Media, Markets, and Associations in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700,” an international, multi-disciplinary, collaborative research project funded by the SSHRC.

Valerie Traub (English, Women’s Studies) – traubv@umich.edu

  • Traub’s research concerns gender and sexuality in early modern England. She is the author of The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, which won the best book of 2002 award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Other books include Desire & Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (1992) and two co-edited collections: Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (1996) and Gay Shame (2009).  Her most recent book, Making Sexual Knowledge: Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, will be published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2015.  She is currently at work on another project on discourses of gender, sexuality, race, and class in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century anatomical and cartographic illustrations, entitled Mapping Embodiment in the Early Modern West: A Prehistory of Normality. She is the recipient of the John D’Arms Award for graduate mentoring and the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award.

Douglas Trevor (English) – dtrevor@umich.edu

  • Trevor is the author of the short story collection The Book of Wonders (SixOneSeven Books, 2017), the novel Girls I Know (SixOneSeven Books, 2013), which won the 2013 Balcones Fiction Prize, and the short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space (University of Iowa Press, 2005), which received the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was named a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction. His work has appeared most recently in Ploughshares Solos, The Iowa Review, The Notre Dame Review, The Minnesota Review, and New Letters. He has also had stories in The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, Black Warrior Review, The New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and more than a dozen other publications. His short fiction has been anthologized in—among other places—The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Among his various honors, Trevor has been named the Theodore Morrison Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and served twice as a writer-in-residence at the Ucross Foundation. He holds an undergraduate degree from Princeton, where he worked with Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison, and a PhD in Renaissance Literature from Harvard. He also teaches courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels on early modern literature, particularly the works of Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton.

Susan (Scotti) Parrish (English, Program in the Environment) – sparrish@umich.edu

  • Parrish is a Professor in the English Department and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. Her research addresses the interrelated issues of race, the environment, and knowledge-making in the Atlantic world from the seventeenth up through the early twenty-first century, with a particular emphasis on southern and Caribbean plantation zones. Her recent book, The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2017), examines how the most devastating, and publicly absorbing, US flood of the twentieth century took on meaning as it moved across media platforms, across sectional divides and across the color line. It was recently awarded the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize (Honorable Mention). Her first book, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (UNCP, 2006), is a study of how people in England and in British-controlled America conceived of—and made knowledge about—American nature within Atlantic scientific networks. This book won both Phi Beta Kappa’s Emerson Award and the Jamestown Prize. A recipient of fellowships from the NEH, the American Antiquarian Society and Harvard’s Charles Warren Center, her teaching at UM has been recognized with the John Dewey Award and the University Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Catherine Sanok (English, Women’s Studies) – sanok@umich.edu

  • Sanok’s research interests center on late medieval English literary and religious culture. She has published two books through the University of Pennsylvania Press: New Legends of England: Forms of Community in Late Medieval Saints’ Lives (2018) and Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England (2007), as well as co-edited the book The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form with Robert J. Meyer-Lee. She has also published essays on gender, genre, cultural difference, and civic performance in journals including Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, New Medieval Literatures, and Modern Language Quarterly.

Lydia M. Soo (History of Art) – lmsoo@umich.edu

  • A historian of architecture and architectural theory, Soo specializes in the early modern period. She is internationally recognized for her work on the 17th century English architect Sir Christopher Wren. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Graham Foundation, and most recently the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art to write a new book entitled The Places and Spaces of Architectural Discourse in Restoration London, examining architectural knowledge production and its physical context following the Great Fire of 1666. Her first book, Wren’s “Tracts” on Architecture and Other Writings, was published in 1998 and reissued in 2007 (Cambridge University Press). She has written articles examining specific problems of 17th century culture, theory, architecture, urbanism, and maps. They include “The Architectural Setting of ‘Empire’: the English experience of Ottoman spectacle in the late 17th century and its consequences” in The Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe (2018), “Baroque Form Generation Practices: a historical study” in Quotation: What Does History Have in Store for Architecture Today? (2017), and “A Baroque City?: London After the Great Fire of 1666” in Giambattista Nolli and Rome: Mapping the City before and after the Pianta Grande (2013). Her ongoing research addresses a range of topics: constructive geometry in Renaissance and Baroque architecture, early modern maps of London, early modern English architecture reassessed in relationship to pre-orientalist knowledge of buildings in the Levant and beyond, as well as spaces of oppression.

Karla Taylor (English) – kttaylor@umich.edu

  • In addition to her position in the Department of English at the University of Michigan, she is also the Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program, and an Affiliate in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures. Her research interests include medieval English literature, Chaucer, Dante, English-Italian literary and cultural relations (14th-16th centuries), translation, and vernacularization. Secondary interests include history of the English language, linguistic theory and earlier texts, and narrative theory.

Theresa Tinkle (English) – tinkle@umich.edu

  • Theresa has published two monographs: Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry (Stanford University Press, 1996), as well as two co-edited collections of essays: Chaucer and the Challenges of Medievalism: Studies in Honor of H. A. Kelly (Peter Lang Verlag, 2003) and The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture (University of Michigan Press, 1998). She has published numerous other articles in journals including Speculum, ELH, and Pedagogy.

Thomas Toon (English) – ttoon@umich.edu

  • His primary interests include language variation and socio-historical linguistics (especially the influences of literacy on processes of language change), Old English, early Middle English, early English paleography and manuscript studies, and regional and social dialectology. He is also interested in Linguistic theory, especially diachronic phonology and syntax and contemporary varieties of English. Some of his publications include The Politics of Early Old English Sound Change (Academic Press, 1983), “New Methods in Old English Dialectology,” in Quantitative Analyses of Linguistic Structure, P. Eckert, ed. (Academic Press, 1986), “Old English Dialects,” in Cambridge History of the English Language, and other articles on literacy, contemporary American English, lexicography.

Ralph Williams (English) – fiesole@umich.edu

  • Ralph Williams is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. He has studied 15 languages including Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, and uses Italian, French, and Latin, especially frequently. He specializes in Medieval and Renaissance literature, Shakespeare, literary theory, comparative literature and Biblical studies. He has taught such wide-ranging courses as The Bible in English, the literature of Chaucer to Frederick Douglass, and the works of Primo Levi and the Memory of Auschwitz. Professor Williams was Associate Chair of the Department of English (for the second time) from 1999 to 2002. He also served from 1996 to 1999 as Director of the Program on Studies in Religion. While Associate Chair of the English Department, he was instrumental in creating and developing the Royal Shakespeare Company Residency program at the University of Michigan. In addition, he continues to work closely with the University Musical Society to further the activities of the RSC Residency.