Position Title
Disginguished Professor of English Emerita
Biography:
Margaret Ferguson's professional papers are held at the Archives of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University; the finding guide can be accessed at Guide to the Margaret W. Ferguson papers, 1971–2023
After retiring at the end of June, 2017, Ferguson was a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch, South Africa from July through September 2017; from October to December, she was a Fellow at the Humanities Research Center of the Australian National University in Canberra. In the Fall of 2019, she did research at King's College, the University of Cambridge. She currently lives in Davis, California, where she pursues her scholarly work and continues to work with former graduate students on their publishing projects. She is on the Editorial Board for The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making. This ambitious digital editorial project launched on November 15, 2018, and can be visited at http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/. She also serves on the Advisory Boards for The Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies and differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.
In 2014 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has subsequently served on several prize committees for the Academy.
She served as as President of the Modern Language Association in 2014-15, delivering the Presidential Address in Vancouver in January 2015 (for link, see below). As a Past President in 2015-17, she chaired a MLA Working Group on K-16 Educational Alliances, which focused on creating and /or supporting partnerships between college teachers of writing, literature, and language and teachers of these subjects in elementary and secondary schools. The K-16 Working Group sponsored a round-table session at the January 2017 MLA Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on "Futures of K-16 Alliances in the MLA," with speakers from secondary schools (including Claire Dawkins, a UCDavis Ph.D. who teaches at the Stanford Online Highschool) and universities. Ferguson co-chaired the session with Professor Anne Ruggles Gere, the 2018 President of the MLA who has in the past led the National Council of Teachers of English and who instituted a new MLA Standing Committee on K-16 Alliances. The Working Group also sponsored a session on "Historical Pedagogies" and collaborated on two workshops, led by Professor Doris Sommer, Harvard University, illustrating her innovative pedagogical project called "Pre-texts" (see http://www.pre-texts.org/).
Ferguson joined the UC Davis English Department in 1997. She received her doctorate from the Yale Department of Comparative Literature in 1974, and taught at Yale, Columbia, and the University of Colorado at Boulder before moving to UC Davis. She has held visiting professorships at UC Berkeley and Middlebury College (The Bread Loaf School of English). Her areas of interest include Early Modern literature, literacy studies, early modern medicine, and feminist and queer theory in English, French, and Italian. Currently, she is a member of the advisory boards for boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature; The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies; Comparative Literature Studies; and Modern Language Quarterly. She has been a member of the executive board of the Renaissance Society of America and has served as a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. Before her term as an elected officer of the MLA, she was a member of the PMLA Editorial Board, the MLA translation prize committee, the Elections Committee, and the Executive Committee for the Division of 17th C. British Literature. She served on the Advisory Board for the Palgrave series The History of British Women Writing (its sixth and final volume, on writing from 1830-1880, edited by Lucy Harding, appeared in October 2018). A member of the National Council of Teachers of English, she has long been interested in cross-level theories and practices of literacy. She has been active in the "MLA Members for Justice in Palestine" and wrote, with David Simpson, a critique of the Canary Mission organization published in Mondoweiss (https://mondoweiss.net/2018/02/educators-denounce-tactics/). In 2016, She helped co-author the mla-member-report-on-palestine-trip.pdf.
Ferguson received an award for Distinguished Graduate Teaching from the UC Davis Academic Senate in 2014; in 2008, she received an Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award from the UC Davis Consortium for Research on Women and Gender. She received awards for undergraduate teaching at Yale and the University of Colorado. She has taught undergraduate courses on Shakespeare, Milton, and early modern women's writing as well as an introductory course for prospective English majors on "Literatures in English to 1700." In 2015, 16, and 17, she led the Honors Seminar for English majors preparing to write a senior thesis; she helped many seminar members prepare to present their work at the Undergraduate Research Conference. In 2016, she designed and taught an upper-division course on "Grammar: Language and Power" that was cross-listed by the departments of English and Linguistics, and by the University Writing Program. At the graduate level, she taught seminars on a range of topics including (in recent years) "Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature," "Questions of Authority: Spenser, Lanyer, and Milton"; and "Travel Literature and Utopian Texts."
From 2006 to 2009, she chaired the English Department and helped hire nine new colleagues. With Frances Dolan, Director of Undergraduate Studies, she facilitated a substantial revision of the undergraduate curriculum. She has given talks at various institutions on the future of the English Major.
She has won fellowships from the NEH, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Davis Humanities Institute in addition to the two short-term fellowships mentioned above in South Africa and Australia. She received the UC Davis Academic Senate's Research Lecturer Award in 2011 and delivered a lecture from her book in progress, entitled "Myths of Hymen: Problems in Gender, Sexuality, and Semiotics," in connection with that award. She also presented three lectures drawn from that project as the Ward Phillips Lecturer at Notre Dame University and has led workshops on her research at Brown University and Syracuse University. The book argues that the (contested) myth of the somatic female hymen can be illuminated--if not fully demystified--by analyzing the myth of the Greek god Hymen, associated with marriage rites and with laments for the loss of same-sex social relations, as counter-narratives to those that fetishize the somatic hymen. The book analyzes textual, visual, and digital evidence from many cultures with a focus on early modern English texts and on contemporary digital discourses about "revirgination" surgeries.
Selected Publications and Presentations:.
"Does the Decline of the Humanities Track the Decline in Civil Society?" Conversation with David Simpson, Andrea Ross, and Andrew Majeske. New American Studies Journal: A Forum, vol. 72, Apr. 2022, doi:10.18422/72-39.
"Doing Some of the Work: Grief, Fear, Hope." boundary 2 online, 17 November 2020.
"Myths of Hymen, Hymenoplasty Surgery Advertisements, and Descriptions of Mass Virginity Testing," University of Pittsburgh, boundary 2 Conference, April 2019.
Co-author of statement to UC California Regents asking that they distance themselves from the website "Canary Mission"; statement posted in Mondoweiss, January 2019, https://mondoweiss.net/2019/01/university-california-distance/
The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 6th edition. Eds. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Tim Kendall. New York: W. W. Norton, 2018. Authored pedagogical essays for this edition's Web Workshops on intertextual dialogues between John Donne and Lucy Russell; Aprha Behn and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; John Milton and John Keats; and William Wordsworth and Gwendolyn Brooks. For the 5th edition of this anthology (2005), Ferguson authored an essay on "Poetic Syntax" (pp. 2053-74 of the printed 5th edition; included in the online materials for the 6th edition).
"Myths of Hymen: Representations of Virgins and Virginity Surgeries and Testing Practices in South Africa," seminar at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, August, 2017; a revised version of this talk was presented at the Humanities Research Center in Canberra, Australia, in October, 2017.
Introduced and co-chaired "The Future of K-16 Alliances at the MLA," Modern Language Convention, Philadelphia, January 2017.
"Europe and Utopia," plenary presentation at the MLA Conference on "Other Europes," Düsseldorf, Germany, June 2016
"Professional Organizations and Advocacy: The Case of the MLA," Ray Smith Symposium Syracuse University (Nov. 2015)
Introduction to Presidential Forum Essays from the MLA Convention of 2015. Profession, Summer 2016.
MLA Presidential Address, "Negotiating Sites of Memory" (Vancouver, B.C., January 2015); available on the Web with color illustrations at https://www.mla.org/Convention/Convention-History/MLA-Presidential-Addresses/2011-15-Presidential-Addresses/2015-Presidential-Address; available in print in PMLA 130.3 (May 2015): 546-565.
"Translation and Homeland Insecurity in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew: An Experiment in Unsafe Reading." Early Modern Cultures of Translation. Eds. Karen Newman and Jane Tylus. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 117-152.
Presidential Columns for the MLA (4 columns in the MLA Newsletter, 2014)
"The Humanities and the Common Good," Provost's Forum on "The Humanities and the Public Good" (April 2014)
"What's an English Major Good For?": contribution to a conference at the University of Tulsa (March 2014)
"Home-Schooling Bianca and Katherine," lecture at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (August 2013)
"Feigning Hymens" (Plenary talk, Shakespeare Association of America, March 2013)
"Period," presentation for an MLA Forum on the 21st Century, MLA Convention (January 2013).
"Fatal Cleopatras and Golden Apples: Economies of Wordplay in Some Shakespearean 'Numbers.'" The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry. Ed. Jonathan Post, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 77-94.
"Home-Schooling Bianca and Katherine," lecture at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (August 2013)
"Feigning Hymens" (Plenary talk, Shakespeare Association of America, March 2013)
"Period," presentation for an MLA Forum on the 21st Century, MLA Convention (January 2013).
"The Letter of Recommendation as Strange Work." PMLA, 127:4 (October 2012): 954-62.
"On Old Periods and New Comparative Literatures / De Periodos Antiguos y Nuevas Literaturas Comparadas," Interview / Entrevista with Margaret Ferguson, by Bélén Bistué, Boletín de Literatura Comparada 37 (2012): 137-58.
"Syntax, Poetic." The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. Ed. Roland Greene et. al. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012: 1401-07. This text spells out the abbreviations in the printed version, making a post-publication pdf that is easier to read, I hope.
Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France. University of Chicago Press, 2003.
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).
"Du Bellay's 'Source de Méduse." Laureations: Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson. Wilmington: University of Delaware Press, 2012, 205-26.
"Hymeneal Instruction." Masculinities, Childhood, Violence: Attending to Early Modern Women--And Men: Proceedings of the 2006 Symposium. Eds. Amy E. Leonard and Karen L. Nelson. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011. 97-129.
"Thomas Nashe: Cornucopias and Gallimaufries of Prose." Teaching Early Modern Prose. Eds. Susannah Brietz-Monta and Margaret W. Ferguson. Modern Language Assoication of America, 2010. 199-213.
Teaching Early Modern Prose. Ed. Susannah Brietz-Monta and Margaret W. Ferguson. Modern Language Association of America, 2010.
"'With All Due Reverence and Respect to the Word of God': Aphra Behn as Skeptical Reader of the Bible and Critical Translator of Fontenelle." Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800. Eds. Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 199-216.
"Conning the Overseers: Women's Illicit Work in Behn's 'The Black Lady.'" In Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar, Issue 5 (Spring 2006).
Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England. Eds. Nancy E. Wright, Margaret W. Ferguson, and Andrew Buck. Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2004.
"Feminism in Time." Introduction by M. Ferguson. Feminism in Time. Ed. Margaret Ferguson and Marshall Brown. Spec. iss. of Modern Language Quarterly 65.1 (March 2004). 7-27.
"Literacies in Early Modern England." Introduction by Eve Rachele Sanders and M. Ferguson. Literacies in Early Modern England. Ed. Margaret Ferguson and Eve Sanders. Special issue of Critical Survey 14.1 (2002).1-8.
"Come Tell Me How You Live." PMLA, 115:5 (October 2000): 1246-50. Essay derived from a presentation at an MLA conference on "The Future of Doctoral Study" held at Madison, Wisconsin.
"The Authorial Ciphers of Aphra Behn." The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650-1740. Ed. Steven N. Zwicker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 225-249.
"Feathers and flies: Aphra Behn and the seventeenth-century trade in exotica." Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture. Eds. Margareta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 235-259.
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.
"Moderation and Its Discontents: Recent Work on Renaissance Women." Review Essay, Feminist Studies (Summer 1994): 349-66.
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.
Feminism and Postmodernism. Ed. Margaret Ferguson and Jennifer Wicke. Special issue of boundary 2 (Summer 1992). Introduction by Jennifer Wicke and Margaret Ferguson. Reissued in expanded form as a book by Duke University Press, 1994.
"Saint Augustine's Region of Unlikeness: The Crossing of Exile and Language." Innovations of Antiquity. Eds. Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden. New York: Routledge, 1992. 69-94.
"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.
Education & Interests:
- Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Yale University, 1974
- M.Phil., Comparative Literature, Yale University, 1972
- A.B., History of Art and English, Cornell University, 1969
- Interests: Early Modern Medicine and Literature, Renaissance women writers, Milton, Shakespeare, Feminist Theory, Literacy Studies; Common Core and Pedagogical Alliances between primary, secondary, and tertiary level teachers of languages and literatures
Doctoral Dissertations directed or co-directed:
At Yale (1974-1986):
1. Abbe Blum, "Licensing and Authority: Milton's Early Prose"; Dr. Blum became an Assistant and then a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of English, Swarthmore College, before deciding to pursue a different profession.
2. Charles Hatten, "Familial Narratives in Milton and Dickens" (co‑directed with Richard Brodhead).
3. Margaret Arculus, "Studies in Romance: Malory, Spenser, and Sidney" (co‑directed with Thomas Greene).
4. Lauren Silberman, "The Figure of the Hermaphrodite in the 1590 Faerie Queene"; three articles from this dissertation (which I co-directed with a. Bartlett Giammati) were published and one received the Spenser Society's award for the best article of 1988. Dr. Silberman is now Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY; her book Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of "The Faerie Queene" was published by the University of California Press in 1995.
5. Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, "Confessional Narratives in Petrarch, St. Teresa, Loyola, and Luther" (co‑directed with Thomas Greene); a revised version of this work was published by Stanford UP in 1995 under the title: Old Masters, New Subjects: Early Modern and Poststructuralist Theories of Will. Dr. Wojciehowski is now a well-published Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin.
6. Susan Schweik, "American Women's Poetry of the Second World War" (co‑directed with R. W. B. Lewis); a revised version of this thesis was published as A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Dr. Schweik is now a Professor of English Emerita at UC Berkeley.
7. Candace Waid, "Edith Wharton and Regionalism" (co‑directed with R. W. B. Lewis); this dissertation won the Porter Prize for the best Ph.D. thesis at Yale in 1986 and a revised version was published as Edith Wharton's Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing (University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Dr. Waid is now an Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara.
8. Miranda Johnson, "Ariosto as a Reader of Dante" (co‑ directed with Paolo Valesio); Dr. Haddad took a position as Assistant Professor of English at Howard University and is now pursuing a writing, parenting, and theater reviewing career in Los Angeles, CA.
9. Margaret Kilgour, "Ingestion as Metaphor and Literary Technique in Rabelais, Milton, Burton, Ruskin, and Northorp Frye." Dr. Kilgour is now a Professor of English (and former department chair) at McGill University; her dissertation was published in 1990 as From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton University Press) and she has published many articles and books during her distinguished career.
10. Leslie E. Moore, "Milton and his Eighteenth Century Readers" (co‑directed with Ronald Paulson); Dr. Moore published a book incorporating parts of this thesis with Stanford University Press in 1990: Beautiful Sublime: The Making of Paradise Lost, 1701-1734. She taught at Yale as an Assistant and Associate Professor until she decided to enter Yale Law School to pursue a legal career.
11. Clare Kinney, "Narrative Theory and the Long Poem: Chaucer's Troilus, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost" (co‑directed with Marie Boroff). This dissertation was revised and published as Strategies of Poetic Narrative: Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Eliot. Cambridge University Press, 1992. Dr. Kinney holds a tenured professorship off English at the University of Virginia.
At Columbia (1986-89):
12. P. A. Skantze, "Drama as Performance and Text: Jonson, Milton, and Behn" (co-directed by me and Jean Howard. English, 1988. Dr. Skantze published her dissertation as Stillness in Motion in Seventeenth-Century Theater (New York: Routledge 2003), and taught theater at Roehampton University, School of Arts, UK.
13. Mary Cregan, "The Uncommon Reader: Virginia Woolf Reads Milton and Shakespeare." English 1989. Dr. Cregan teaches English at Barnard College in New York City. She has recently published The Scar : A Personal History of Depression and Recovery (WW Norton & Co., 2019).
At University of Colorado (1989-97):
14. José María Rodriguez-Garcia, "Bacon's Institutionalizing Narratives." Comparative Literature, 1993. Dr. Garcia currently is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Duke University and won the 2010 PROSE Award for Excellence in Literature, Language and Linguistics for The City of Translation: Poetry and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Columbia.(Association of American Publishers/Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division).
15. Julie Radliff, "Feasting and Hospitality in Renaissance Epic." English, 1994. A brilliant scholar and beloved young mother and wife, Julie Radliff died soon after finishing her doctoral degree. I mourn her untimely death.
16. Robin Bott, “Sociolinguistics and Renaissance Drama” (co-director with Katherine Eggert). English 1997. Dr. Bott obtained a tenure-track position and held a tenured position at Adrian College in Michigan, where she was a beloved teacher. She died in December 2016.
17. James Tasse, "Public and Private Domains in the Shakespearean Theater" (English, 1998).
18. Rhonda Sanford, "A Sense of Place: Maps and their Representations in English Renaissance Literature." English, 1999. Dissertation published in revised form as Mapping the Renaissance (Palgrave, 2001). She is currently a Professor of English at Fairmont State University.
19. Deborah Uman, “This Defective Edition: Notions of Translation, Gender, and Authorship in Renaissance England” (co-director with Katherine Eggert and Richard Halpern). English 1999. Dr. Uman obtained a tenure-track position at Eastern Connecticut State University and then worked as a professor at St. John Fisher College, Rochester, New York. She is now Dean of the Telitha E. Lindquist School of Arts and Humanities at Weber State University. Her book Women as Translators in Early Modern Europe was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2012.
20. Laura Wilson, “Playing Parts: Components of the Body on the English Early Modern Stage” (co-director with Katherine Eggert). English 2002. Wilson works at a public library in Westminster, Colorado.
At University of California / Davis: (1997-present)
21. Steve Cassel, "'Honesty' in Shakespeare." English, 2004. A talented teacher and meticulous scholar, Dr. Cassel died young of heart failure. I mourn his death.
22. Andrew Majeske, "Equity in English Renaissance Culture." English, 2003. Dr. Majeske published his dissertation as Equity in English Renaissance Literature: Thomas More and Edmund Spenser. New York, Routledge, 2006. He is currently a Professor at John Jay College.
23. Katie Kalpin Smith, "Charming Tongues: Representations of Women's Persuasive Speech in Early Modern England." English, 2005. The thesis was co-directed with Frances E. Dolan. Dr. Kalpin, now Dr. Katie Kalpin-Smith, holds a tenured professorship at the University of South Carolina at Aiken and is the author of Gender, Speech, and Audience Reception in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2017). She won her university's prestigious award for scholarly achievement in 2018.
24. Onnaca Heron, "Chiasmus in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum." English, 2005.
25. Jung Kook Paik, "Ideas of the Crowd in Shakespeare's Othello, Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest." English, 2007. Dr. Paik teaches English in Seoul, Korea.
26. Karen Wilson, "Marriage and the Problem of Evil: Milton's Material Moment." English, 2007. Dr. Wilson retired to Ashland, Oregon from a position as a Lecturer in Writing at the University of Southern California.
27. Tara Pedersen, "A Picture of Mermaids: Gazing at an Early Modern Image.” English, 2009. Dr. Petersen now holds a tenured position at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and has published a revised version of her thesis as Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2015). She is at work on a novel.
28. Belén Bistué, "The Difficulty of Thinking Translation in Early Modern Europe." Comparative Literature, 2009. An article derived from this dissertation won the Owen A. Aldridge prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association in 2009. Dr. Bistue also won the Allen G. Marr Prize for the best dissertation at UC Davis (2011). She holds a tenured research position at the National University of Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina; a revised version of her dissertation was published as Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe by Ashgate in 2013, and she has published many articles in both English and Spanish. She is currently teaching as a Lecturer in the Comparative Literature Department of UC Berkeley.
29. Kyle Pivetti. "We'll Remember With Advantage: Mnemonic Arts in English Renaissance Literature." English 2010. Dr. Pivetti holds a tenured Associate Professor position at Norwich University in Vermont, and a revised version of his dissertation, Of Memory and Literary Form: Making the Early Modern English Nation, was published in 2015 by The University of Delaware Press. Dr. Pivetti has also co-edited a book with Dr. John Garrison called Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection (Routledge 2016) and has co-authored a book with Garrison on Shakespeare at Peace (Routledge, 2018). Pivetti and Garrison are co- editing a series for Routledge called "Spotlight on Shakespeare."
30. John Garrison. "Friendship in English Renaissance Texts." English, 2011. Having worked as an assistant and then a tenured associate professor at Carroll University, where he won the Outstanding Teacher award in 2013 and an award for outstanding service in 2015, Garrison has recently moved to a tenured Associate Professorship at Grinnell College in Iowa. His book Friendship and Queer Theory in the Renaissance: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern England was published by Routledge in 2014, followed in 2015 by his book Glass, for the Bloomsbury Press's series on "Object Lessons." In addition to authoring many articles, Dr. Garrison has co-edited a book with Dr. Kyle Pivetti called Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection (Routledge 2016). They have co-authored Shakespeare at Peace, which appeared in 2018 (Routledge), and are now co-editing a Routledge series called "Spotlight on Shakespeare." His book Shakespeare and the Afterlife was published by Oxford UP in 2018, and he is currently working on a study of memory and pleasure in Shakespeare's Sonnets; in 2021, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete this project. He is now teaching at the Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles.
31. Natalie Grand, "Female Tutors in Early Modern English Drama." English, 2011. Dr. Grand works as a free lance writer in Sacramento, CA.
32. Claire Dawkins, Not a Whore: The Defense against Sexual Slander in Early Modern English Romances." English, 2013. Dr. Dawkins has a full-time position teaching English literature at the Stanford Online High School. She participated in a roundtable on "K-16 Educational Alliances" at the 2017 MLA Convention in Philadelphia.
33. Valerie Billing. English, 2014. Her dissertation, co-directed by M. Ferguson and Gina Bloom, is being revised for publication as "Size Matters: The Erotics of Stature in Early Modern English Literature and Culture." She has published five articles and currently holds a tenure-track Assistant Professorship at Central College in Pella, Iowa.
34. Dyani Johns Taff, "Contested Vessels: Gender and the Maritime in Early Modern Texts." English, 2015. Dr. Johns Taff is an Assistant Professor at Colby College and is completing a book manuscript entitled "Gendered Seascapes and Monarchy in Early Modern English Literature," the book is under contract with The University of Edinburgh Press. She published "Gendered Circulation and the Marital Ship of State in Jonson's The Staple of News" in Renaissance Drama 46, vol. 2 (Fall 2018) and her article on genre, erotic secrecy, and endings in Chaucer's Troilus and Creseyde has recently been published in Studies in Philology.
35. Christopher J. Wallis. "Utopian Occupations in Early Modern English Literature." English, 2018.
36. Victoria While, "Petrarchizing Genders and Genres in English, Italian, and Spanish Literatures." Comparative Literature, 2019.
37. Thomas Johnson Nez, "Exigencies of Inscription: Documentary Writing and the Crises of Modernism," English, 2021; co-directed with Professor Nathan Brown, Concordia University, where he is Director of the Centre for Expanded Poetics and holds the Canada Research Chair in Poetics. Dr. Nez is currently a Lecturer in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Longwood University, VA. He has published three articles, given many conference presentations, and is revising his dissertation as a book to be entitled "Beyond Commitment: Literary Documentation and the Crises of Postmodernism."
I served on the dissertation committees of recent Ph.D.'s Ashley Sarpong, Samantha Snively, and Lee Emrich.
- B.A. with Distinction, Cornell University 1969 (member of the first class of the Six Year Ph.D. Program)
- Ph.D. Yale University Comparative Literature 1974
- Guggenheim Fellowship 1985
- American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow, 2014
- President, Modern Language Association, 2014-2015 (preceded by the positions of second and first Vice President and member of Executive Committee)