Faculty Profile - Nancy Bradley Warren
You may know her as the plagiarist-buster, aka Director of Undergraduate Studies. Or you may have taken a class with her on medieval and early modern women's literature. Perhaps she is only a cheerful face whom you have not had the pleasure to meet just yet… but this is one professor you should meet, and, if you are a graduate student, you will meet her, as she is the incoming Director of Graduate Studies. Nancy Warren plays an integral part in this department.
One reason why she is so involved is simply because she likes it here. Her feeling about the department is that it is diverse and collegial. Her colleagues, she says, are intellectually generous-she feels that, not since graduate school, has she learned as much as she has from being in this department. Not only does she have fantastic medieval and early modern colleagues-important because Dr. Warren is keenly interested in examining continuity and change between the medieval and the early modern-but also she works among excellent creative writing faculty, in whom she has found inspiration to see texts in another light and to think about the nuances and subtleties of style, which are sometimes not as immediately apparent to the literature scholar.
Nancy Warren is also very much involved with her students. Her genuine interest in students' pursuits and projects, her availability, her enthusiasm about teaching-all make her a gifted, and giving, professor. If the way her classes fill up is any evidence at all, it is clear that she is popular among students. And Dr. Warren loves teaching; she declares that she approaches it with a "missionary zeal"-particularly appropriate as she teaches texts by and about medieval and early modern women religious zealots. She explains that it is the moment when the student who had signed up for the class to fulfill a requirement and who does not necessarily feel strongly about the texts or time period, the moment when there appears a gleam in the eyes, an excitement in the tone, an enthusiasm in the response from that previously indifferent student-these moments constitute a considerable portion of what makes teaching worthwhile for her. That Warren is so enthusiastic herself undoubtedly ensures that she will have many such moments in her classes; passion is contagious.
Part of the reason that Professor Warren's passion is so apparent in her classes is that she does not shy away from bringing her own research interests into the classroom. Rather than teaching the same texts semester after semester, with a canned lecture and insipid discussion questions, Dr. Warren's course readings vary depending on what she happens to be working on. She conveys her excitement about these texts, and is also extremely interested in hearing students' reactions to them, often gaining insight and new perspectives from students. Thus, professor and students are learning together and from each other, which makes for a very exciting classroom environment indeed. Future courses Dr. Warren anticipates are "Intertextual Chaucer," a graduate level course offered in Fall 2006. This will be the first time Warren will teach Chaucer to graduate students, and she is greatly looking forward to it. The class is on Chaucer, but it will also look at influences and appropriations of Chaucer. The intertextuality part comes through seeing Chaucer and other texts in dialogue with each other. Another course on the horizon is "The Multi-cultural Middle Ages," which she proposes as a graduate level course offered under the auspices of Humanities. The course would examine the equivalent of the "medieval" in other cultures, alongside the Western middle ages. Texts and contexts of medieval "Others" which are largely overlooked in English literary studies would be read in dialogue with Western medieval texts.
Another exciting thing to come will be Dr. Warren's book, The Embodied Word: Female Spirituality, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350-1700. This forthcoming book is the third is what Warren feels is really one entire book broken down into three smaller parts. Like her first book, Spiritual Economies, and her second book, Women of God and Arms, this one will focus on breaking down the monolithic categorization and periodization of Catholic and Protestant, medieval and early modern. Looking at the intersections of categories that have been traditionally pitted against one another in a binaristic fashion, Warren engages in a sustained scholarly study of women's spirituality across the "Great Divide" between pre- and post-Reformation religion and medieval and early modern English culture. The examination of the formation of women's spirituality in relation to their lived experiences within their communities occupies Warren's interest.
What about Warren's own lived experiences, her life in her own community? Outside of the Williams building, Dr. Warren spends time with her husband, and her 5 year old son, Drew. She plays piano and French horn, and met her husband in a brass ensemble. She secretly dreams of forming a Warren family ensemble, and hopes Drew will take up trumpet so they can play together! Warren also began learning ballet at the age of 27, because it was something she always wanted to do, but grew up in a small town that had no dance school. Now she attends dance classes twice and week and loves every minute of it. The more she reveals, the more I am led to conclude that Nancy Bradley Warren is every bit as surprising and talented as the women who occupy her studies. Her presence is warmly felt by all in the department.
photos and prose by Molly Hand