Contact: Elizabeth Spiller
English Department
Florida State University
427 Williams Building
Tallahassee, Florida 32306-1580
Phone: 850 644 1543
Fax: 850 644 0811
The Renaissance Studies program in the Department of English at Florida State University offers a wide range of courses for undergraduates and postgraduates from faculty whose research and teaching interests represent diverse and multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of Renaissance literature and culture. Early modern science, Renaissance lyric, print and manuscript culture in the seventeenth century, ecocriticism, Eastern encounters, women's spirituality, women's sexuality, critical race studies, and beyond—students and faculty explore such exciting topics together, in the classroom, in publications, in discussions at meetings of the Renaissance Group.
Interdisciplinarity is emphasized in JEMCS (The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies), hosted by the English department at FSU, founded and edited by English faculty. The journal, which is the official publication of the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies (GEMCS), illustrates well our interests in reaching beyond the boundaries of the canon and English literary studies. For students who wish to pursue in-depth research of Renaissance textual culture, opportunities for interdisciplinary study extend beyond the English department. The History of Text Technologies program offers an interdisciplinary course of research in areas ranging from Art History, Modern Languages, History, Humanities, Religion, and more.
Literature PhD student William
John
Silverman's article on "Castration" in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Love, Courtship, & Sexuality Through History, Volume 3: The Early Modern
Period. It was published in December by Greenwood Press.
The HOTT program faculty will be working with Palgrave/Macmillan to publish a new book series called "History of Text Technologies," with Gary Taylor as general editor and Elizabeth Spiller as one of three FSU faculty on the editorial board.
The journal Renaissance and Reformation has accepted for publication Molly Hand's article entitled "'Now is hell landed here upon the earth': Renaissance Poverty and Witchcraft in Thomas Middleton’s The Black Book."
Oxford University Press will release Gary Taylor's edition of Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works on November 22, the first time that all of the plays, poems and manuscripts of "the other Shakespeare" have appeared in a single volume. This publication will be accompanied by the release of a companion volume of essays, also edited by Gary Taylor, titled Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture.
Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works also includes contributions by tenured faculty Celia Daileader and Dan Vitkus, assistant in the HOTT program Ilaria Andreoli, instructor Trish Thomas Henley, and graduate student Molly Hand.
Bruce Boehrer has recently edited A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance, Volume 3 of the 6-volume series A Cultural History of Animals. The series was published in November, 2007 by Berg, a division of Oxford Interntional.
Nancy Bradley
Warren, associate professor of English and courtesy
associate professor of religion, has been awarded a highly prestigious
fellowship at the National Humanities Center in the North Carolina
Research Triangle. The National Humanities Center is the only major
independent American institute for advanced study in all fields of the
humanities, and it provides a national focus for the best work in
English and the liberal arts. Professor Warren was one of 35 fellows
selected from over 430 applicants in the 2007-2008 fellowship
competition. During the tenure of her fellowship, Professor Warren
hopes to complete her book-in-progress, The Embodied Word: Female
Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures
1350-1700. Under advance contract at University of Notre Dame Press,
this work is a comparative study of medieval and early modern women's
distinctive ways of writing about religious experience. It undertakes
an exploration of the textual and historical relations among gendered
individuals, human others, and God, and it challenges long-established
distinctions between medieval and early modern culture, Catholicism and
Protestantism, orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Congratulations to Professor
Nancy Warren for bringing this honor to FSU.
Anne Coldiron received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to participate in a summer seminar for professors. This seminar took place in Antwerp, at the Plantin Press, and Oxford, at the Bodleian Library, with additional site visits to archives and early printing presses in Brussels and London. The seminar, "The Reformation of the Book 1450-1700," investigated not only the
material technology of late-medieval and early modern book production, but the gradual re-forming of cultural and literary practices related to the production, dissemination, and reading of books.
The Renaissance Group meets once a month during regular semesters to discuss research and works in progress of group members. Active involvement of both graduate students and faculty ensures lively discussion and valuable feedback for authors. In addition to serving as a workshop, the Renaissance group holds discussions on primary and secondary texts, as well as professional matters such as publishing and preparing for the job market. The group provides its members with a comfortable environment away from campus in which we can eat, drink, socialize, and discuss all things Renaissance. For more information, contact Molly Hand (mmm02m@fsu.edu).
