Professor Emeritus
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My scholarly work in European Renaissance literature ultimately focused on age studies or “literary gerontology”: how old age was understood, misunderstood, and depicted in early modernity, amid the intergenerational politics that shaped period attitudes. I published my initial work on the subject in Constituting Old Age in Early Modern English Literature, from Queen Elizabeth to King Lear. That book contested traditional presumptions that late life was then dismissed as little more than a time of withdrawal and preparation for death, through close rereading of such Elizabethan authors as Spenser, Sidney, Ralegh, Shakespeare, Donne, and the queen herself. I have since then edited and contributed to Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Old Age in the Early Modern Era (1400-1650)—a project I developed during a faculty residency at the University of Padua in the spring of 2018—scheduled for release in 2025.
Selected Publications
- Editor, A Cultural History of Old Age in the Early Modern Era, 1400-1650 (forthcoming 2025)
- “Fantasies of Prolongevity in Early Modern Culture,” The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging (2024)
- “‘The world can be judge’: Edmund Molyneux, Philip Sidney, and the Sublimation of Enmity,” Sidney Journal 34 (2016)
- “‘Parole estreme’: Canzoniere 126,” Approaches to Teaching Petrarch’s Canzoniere and the Petrarchian Tradition (2014)
- Constituting Old Age in Early Modern English Literature, from Queen Elizabeth to King Lear (2012)
- “Lyric Poetry,” The Classical Tradition (2010)
- “Translating Ovid,” The Blackwell Companion to Ovid (2009)
- “Sidney’s Exemplary Horse Master and the Disciplines of Discontent,” Renaissance Historicisms (2008)
- “Fall and Decline: Confronting Lyric Gerontophobia in Donne’s ‘The Autumnall’,” John Donne Journal 26 (2007)
- “The Breast and Belly of a Queen: Elizabeth After Tilbury,” Early Modern Women 2 (2007)
- “Made plaine by examples: Parceling Philip Sidney in Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetorike,” Sidney Journal 24 (2006)
- Editor, Ovid in English (1998)
- Policy in Love: Lyric and Public in Ovid, Petrarch, and Shakespeare (1994)
- “Retrieving Jonson’s Petrarch,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1993)
- “Turning Others’ Leaves: Astrophil and the Experience of Defeat,” Spenser Studies 10 (1992)
- “Flecknoe’s Cabinet and Marvell’s Cankered Muse,” Essays in Criticism 40 (1990)
- “Misdoubting His Estate: Dynastic Anxiety in Sidney’s Arcadia,” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988)
- “A Reconsideration of Ovid’s Fasti,” Illinois Classical Studies 10 (1985)
Honors, Grants, and Awards
- Jeffrey Henderson Research Fellowships (2009-10 and 2016-17)
- NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorship (2005–08)
- NEH Scholarly Publications grant for Policy in Love (1994)
- Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowships (Summer 1992, 1995)