Ph.D., Yale University, 1974
M.Phil., Yale University, 1972
A.B., Cornell University, 1969

Margaret Ferguson joined the UC Davis faculty as Professor of English 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 editorial board for Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature and is on the advisory boards of Differences: A Journal of Feminist 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 committee that awards prizes for translations, and the Elections Committee.  She has also been on the board of the Renaissance Society of America and has served as a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. She won teaching awards at Yale and the University of Colorado and an Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award at the University of California, Davis.  Winner of several fellowships including a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a NEH Fellowship, Professor Ferguson served as Chair of the UC Davis English Department from 2006 to 2009.  She is currently working on a book called "Cries and Whispers: Cultural Debates About the Hymen."

Publication Spotlight

Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France
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

• Teaching Early Modern Prose. Ed. Margaret Ferguson and Susannah Brietz-Monta. Modern Language Association. Forthcoming 2010.
• "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. M. Ferguson secondary author of introduction, 3-22.
• 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. M. Ferguson primary author of introduction, 1-59.
• 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 Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986. Introduction by Margaret Ferguson.
• "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.
• Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983.
  


Email:  mwferguson@ucdavis.edu