Professor Dolan joined the UC Davis faculty as Professor of English in 2003. Before coming to Davis, she taught at Miami University, as well as the University of Chicago and Columbia University. Her teaching and research focus on early modern English literature and history (1500-1700), although she is increasingly interested in how that particular past bears on the present. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Newberry Library and the Folger Library as well as a Monticello College Foundation Fellowship at the Newberry.   In 2004-5, she served as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America.

  With the support of a 2009-2010 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Dolan is researching and writing her fourth book, "True Relations: Reading, Evidence, and Seventeenth-Century England."  The project explores the connection between debates regarding standards of evidence in the early modern period and debates among scholars today regarding their selection, interpretation, and use of textual evidence. Kinds of evidence addressed include depositions, conduct books, pamphlets, ballads, and plays.

Publication Spotlight

Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy
  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008

"Why does marriage so often lead to violence? In her timely and important new book, Frances Dolan identifies the culprit: an 'economy of scarcity' that modern marriage inherits from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Powerfully argued and wonderfully well documented, Marriage and Violence provides a rare example of how historical scholarship can illuminate the present."—Richard Helgerson, University of California, Santa Barbara

 "For Marriage, the Honeymoon Is Over"

Anne Boleyn and the Chop Heard 'Round the World

"How we ended up with such vile ideas about marriage" (interview with Josey Vogels)

Selected Articles:

• "Why Are Nuns Funny?"  Huntington Library Quarterly 70.4 (December 2007) 1-26.
• “Hermione’s Ghost: Catholicism, the Feminine, and the Undead in Early Modern Studies,” The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Palgrave, 2007), pp.  213-237.
  
• “Battered Women, Petty Traitors, and the Legacy of Coverture,” Feminist Studies 29.2
   (Summer, 2003):  249-277.
• “Reading, Work, and Catholic Women’s Biographies,” English Literary Renaissance 33.3 (Autumn 2003): 328-57.
  
• “Gender and the ‘Lost’ Spaces of Catholicism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32.4 (Spring, 2002): 641-665.
• "'Ashes and ‘the Archive’:  The London Fire of 1666, Partisanship, and Proof,'” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.2 (2001):  379-408. 
• “Reading, Writing, and Other Crimes,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture:
   Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan     (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 142-67. 
  
• "‘Ridiculous Fictions’: Making Distinctions in the Discourses of Witchcraft,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7.2 (1995): 82-110.

• “‘Gentlemen, I have one thing more to say’:  Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563-1680,” Modern Philology 92.2 (1994):  157-78.
• “‘Taking the pencil out of God's hand’:  Art, Nature, and the Face-painting Debate in Early Modern England,” PMLA 108.2 (1993):  224-39.
  

Radio Broadcast:

Other Books:

• Whores of Babylon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Reprinted in paper with a new preface by the University of Notre Dame Press, 2005.
• The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts. Boston: Bedford Books, 1996.

• Dangerous Familiars:  Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1500-1700. Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1994.
  

• Five plays for the New Pelican Shakespeare (As You Like It, Comedy of Errors, Richard II, Timon of Athens, Winter's Tale).