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 also teaches and writes 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.   Most recently, she was the Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library. In 2004-5, she served as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America.  At Davis, she has been named an Outstanding Graduate Mentor, a Herbert A. Young Society Deans' Fellow, and the recipient of an Academic Senate Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award.

She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Time and Terroir:  A Northern California Renaissance, an inquiry into what difference it makes to study sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England from the vantage point of twenty-first century Northern California.  The book is organized around dialogues across time and space on the topics of bees, soil amendment, biodynamic viticulture, and "local" or "slow" food.  It asks whether living human subjects can be resources for historical research, whether history has anything to teach "hands on" practitioners today, and, if so, what form this "history" takes.  She is also working on a book on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night for the new Arden Language and Writing series. 

Publication Spotlight

  Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

"True Relations pairs a methodological inquiry with historical analysis of specific case histories connecting fact to fiction in the early modern period. No book to date has traced the particular way that scholars of the early modern period devise a practice of reading once they affirm the axiom that the 'real' is constructed. Dolan offers an unusually lucid and crisp tour of the social stakes involved in reading strategies and evidentiary standards."—Wendy Wall, Northwestern University

Other Books: 

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

• 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).
• New introduction to Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness. Methuen/New Mermaids edition, 2012.

Selected Articles:

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

• "One Head is Better than Two:  The Aphoristic Afterlife of Renaissance Tragic Plots," Laureations:  Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson, ed. Roze Hentschell and Kathy Lavezzo (Delaware:  University of Delaware Press, 2012), 91-110.
  

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

• "'Can this be certain?' The Duchess of Malfi's Secrets," The Duchess of Malfi:  A Critical Guide, ed. Christina Luckyj (London:  Continuum, 2011), 119-35.
  

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