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 also begun to teach and write on Children's Literature. 

Dolan has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (at the Newberry Library and the Folger Library), and the Monticello College Foundation.   In 2004-5, she served as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America.  At Davis, she has been named an Outstanding Graduate Mentor and a Herbert A. Young Society Deans' Fellow.

During the 2011-2012 academic year, Dolan is the Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library.  She is currently completing her fourth book, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England, which is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press.  The project connects seventeenth-century debates about textual evidence to recent debates regarding the use of seventeenth-century texts as historical evidence.

Publication Spotlight

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

"Marriage and Violence is an original, timely, and compelling study of the impact of early modern English discourses about marriage on contemporary understandings of marital violence. Arguing that when marriage explodes into violence we can see the past haunting the present, Dolan both presents a radically new history of marriage and provides us with some new conceptual tools for rethinking present marital ideologies."—Valerie Traub, University of Michigan

 "For Marriage, the Honeymoon Is Over"

Anne Boleyn and the Chop Heard 'Round the World

Wolf Hall:  Another Spin on the Other Boleyn?

Selected Articles:

• "Re-reading Rape in The Changeling," Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 11.1 (Spring/Summer, 2011):  4-29.

• "Shakespeare and Marriage:  An Open Question," Literature Compass 8/9 (2011):  620-34.

• "Tracking the Petty Traitor across Genres," Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini (Burlington, VT:  Ashgate, 2010), pp. 149-171.

• "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. 
  

• “‘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.
  

Other Books:

• Catholic Culture in Early Modern England.  Edited with Ronald Corthell, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti.  Notre Dame:  University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
  

• 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).