Margaret Ferguson joined the UC Davis faculty in 1997. Before coming to Davis, she taught at Yale, Columbia, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has held visiting professorships at UC Berkeley and Middlebury College (The Bread Loaf School of English). Her areas of interest include Renaissance literature, literacy studies, and feminist theory; she has published extensively on these topics. Currently, she is a member of the advisory boards for Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, and Modern Language Quarterly.  She has served on many committees of the Modern Language Association, including the Executive Committee, the PMLA committee, the translation prize committee, the Elections Committee, and the Executive Committee for the Division of 17th C. British Literature. She was recently elected second vice president of the MLA and will serve as President in 2014-15.  She has also been on the executive board of the Renaissance Society of America and has served as a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. She received teaching awards at Yale and the University of Colorado and an Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award at the University of California, Davis.  She  chaired thye UC Davis English Department from 2006 to 2009; during that time she helped to hire nine new colleagues.  She has won fellowships from the NEH, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and, most recently, from the American Council of Learned Societies to support research for her current book, which is entitled "Missing the Maidenhead: Cultural Debates About the Hymen in Early Modern England." The book's concluding chapter shows how myths about virginity persist in today's culture and, particularly, in the increasing incidence, around the world, of "revirgination" surgeries called "hymenoplasties." 

Publication Spotlight

 
by Margaret Ferguson

Dido's Daughters is the winner of the Roland Bainton Prize for Sixteenth Century Studies (2004), the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Prize (2004) and Honorable Mentions for the American Comparative Literature Association's Réné Wellek Prize (2004) and the Renaissance Society of America's Phyllis Goodheart Gordan Book Prize (2004).

Selected Publications

• "Du Bellay's 'Source de Meduse." Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson. Wilmington: University of Delaware Press, 2012, 205-26.
•  Teaching Early Modern Prose. Ed. Susannah Brietz-Monta and Margaret W. Ferguson. Modern Language Association of America, 2010.
  http://www.mla.org/store/PID392
  

• "Conning the Overseers: Women's Illicit Work in Behn's 'The Black Lady.'" In Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar, Issue 5 (Spring 2006): http://eserver.org/emc

• The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 5th ed. Ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Essay on "Poetic Syntax" by M. Ferguson, 2053-74.
• Women, Poetry, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England. Ed.  Nancy Wright, Margaret Ferguson, and Andrew Buck. Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2004.
  
• Feminism in Time. Ed. Margaret Ferguson and Marshall Brown. Spec. iss. of Modern Language Quarterly 65.1 (March 2004). Introduction by M. Ferguson, 7-27.
• Literacies in Early Modern England. Ed. Margaret Ferguson and Eve Sanders. Special issue of Critical Survey 14.1 (2002). Editors' introduction, 1-8.
• Cary, Elizabeth. The Tragedy of Mariam, Faire Queen of Jewry (1613) and The Lady Falkland: Her Life.  Ed. Barry Weller and Margaret Ferguson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.  Introduction, 1-59. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/361751.The_Tragedy_of_Mariam_the_Fair_Queen_of_Jewry
• Postmodernism and Feminism. Ed. Margaret Ferguson and Jennifer Wicke. Special issue of Boundary 2 (Summer 1992). Reissued in expanded form as a book by Duke University Press, 1994.
• Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. Introduction, xv-xxxi.http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/685576.Rewriting_the_Renaissance
• "1549: An Offensive Defense for a New Intellectual Elite" in The Harvard History of French Literature. Ed. Denis Hollier. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989,  194-98
•  "Hamlet: Letters and Spirits," in  Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. New York and London: Methuen Press, 1985, 212-38. Reprinted in Hamlet: New Critical Views, ed. David Kastan. New York: G.K. Hall, 1995; and in Hamlet: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed. Cyrus Hoy, 1992.
• Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/590935.Trials_of_Desire


Email:  mwferguson@ucdavis.edu