Professors Emeriti

Inglis Professor Emeritus, University of King's College

Email: william.barker@dal.ca

Research Topics:

• Early Modern Literature

Professor Emeritus

Email: John.Baxter@dal.ca

Research Topics:

• Early Modern Literature
• Rhetoric and Poetics
• Religion and Literature

Education:

• BA, BEd, MA, PhD (Alberta)

Selected Publications:

Books

• Shakespeare's Poetic Styles: Verse Into Drama.  1980; reprinted London: Routledge, 2005.
• [as editor, with Gordon Harvey.] In Defence of Adam: Essays on Bunyan, Milton, and Others by C. Q. Drummond. Norfolk: Brynmill Press/ Edgeways Books, 2004.  Paperback edition, 2005.
• [as editor, with J. Patrick Atherton.] Aristotle’s Poetics. Translation and Commentary by George Whalley.  Kingston and Montreal:  McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997.

Articles

• “Learning to Spell: George Herbert and the Art of Reading,” George Herbert Journal, Vol. 44 (2023): 63-83.
• “The Grammar of Faith in Twelfth Night: Richard Hooker’s Gift to Shakespeare,” in Faith and Reason in the Reformations, ed. Terence J. Kleven (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022), 57-74.
• “The Aristotle-Coleridge Axis Revisited,” Plenary address from the Proceedings of the 2015 George Whalley Conference. http://georgewhalley.ca/gwp (Fall, 2016).
• “Tying the Knot in Othello,” Essays in Criticism 64.3 (July, 2014): 266-92.
• “Reported Speech in The Winter’s Tale,” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Reforme 36.3 (Summer, 2013): 127-51.
• “Perilous Stuff: Poems of Religious Meditation,” Renascence: Essays on Value in Literature 62.2 (Winter, 2010):89-115. Winner of the 2012 Joseph M. Schwarz Memorial Prize ($1000).

Emeritus George Munro Chair in Literature and Rhetoric

Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada

Email: Leonard.Diepeveen@dal.ca

Research Topics:

• American Literature
• Modernist Literature
• Textual Studies
• Reception History
• Visual Arts and Literature
• Fraud and Modernism

Education:

• BA - Calvin College
• MA, PhD - Illinois

Selected Publications:

• "Shiny Things: Reflective Surfaces and Their Mixed Meanings." Co-authored by Timothy van Laar.  Intellect Books and University of Chicago, 2021. 
• "Modernist Fraud: Hoax, Parody, Deception." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
• Ed. "Tender Buttons," by Gertrude Stein. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2018.
• Ed. "Mock Modernism: An Anthology of Parodies, Travesties, Frauds; 1910-1935." Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014.
• "Artworld Prestige: Arguing Cultural Value." New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Co-authored by Timothy van Laar.
• "The Difficulties of Modernism." New York: Routledge, 2003.
• "Changing Voices: The Modern Quoting Poem." Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.

Awards:

• SSHRC Research Grant, 1995-1998, 2005-2008.

Professor Emeritus

Email: ronald.huebert@dal.ca

Research Topics:

• Early Modern literature
• John Donne
• Spectatorship
• Privacy

Education:

• BA - Saskatchewan
• MA, PhD - Pittsburgh

Professor Huebert has been concerned for many years with the nominally antithetical notions of spectatorship and privacy. At present, he is writing a work of historical fiction in which John Donne is the protagonist. All of these interests converge in his essay, "Looking at John Donne Looking at God," chapter seven in Early Modern Spectatorship, a collection of essays he edited in collaboration with David McNeil. The publication of his mongraph, Privacy in the Age of Shakespeare, was followed by a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies.

His taste for interdisciplinary thinking led him to serve for several years as Editor of The Dalhousie Review, and to participate in the development of the Early Modern Studies Program at the University of King's College. He loves live theatre and seventeenth-century manuscripts; he would not wish to choose one over the other.

Selected Publications:

Books:

• [As editor, with David McNeil] "Early Modern Spectatorship: Interpreting English Culture", 1500–1700. Montréal: McGill-Queens's University Press, 2018.
• "Privacy in the age of Shakespeare." Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.
• "The Performance of Pleasure in English Renaissance Drama." Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Articles:

• "What's wring with Mis-devotion? A John Donne Enigma."Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 41.2 (2018): 5–20.
• "'Study our Manuscripts': John Donne's Problems with Privacy." The Seventeeth Century26.1 (2011): 1-21.

Awards

• Lifetime Achievement Award, Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies (2016)

Professor Emerita

Email: Christina.luckyj@dal.ca

Research Topics:

• Early Modern literature
• Gender studies
• Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
• 17th century women's writing

Education:

• BA, MA, PhD - Toronto

I began my academic career by focusing on the dark and labyrinthine plays of Shakespeare’s contemporary John Webster. In my PhD thesis (later published as "A Winter’s Snake: Dramatic Form in the Plays of John Webster", I argued that Webster uses principles of repetition and variation to structure his plays – principles that become especially evident in performance. I subsequently went on to edit both the text of Webster’s "The White Devil" and a volume of essays on Webster’s "Duchess of Malfi". But my fascination with Webster probably came in large part from his astonishing portraits of strong and complex female characters such as the Duchess of Malfi and Vittoria. In the last ten years I have extended my research to their real-life contemporaries, by exploring writing produced by early modern women of the same period: Mary Wroth, Rachel Speght, and Aemilia Lanyer. Instead of “ghettoizing” women writers, however, I seek to understand the cultural space shaped and inhabited by both male and female-authored works. My 2002 book, “A Moving Rhetoricke: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England", for example, argued that silence was an unstable and contested site of meaning for early modern men and women alike. If masculine silence frequently imitated female self-containment, feminine silence often slid unmanageably from chastity to desire, obedience to resistance. If feminine silence began to do ideological work for early modern male authors by signalling the turn away from a rhetorical culture, early modern women writers appropriated the “moving rhetoric” of silence for their own purposes. My new book, "Liberty and the Politics of the Female Voice in Early Stuart England "(Cambridge University Press 2022) continues this work by examining the work of women writers through the lens of religious politics rather than gender. In a 1624 sermon by Puritan preacher William Whately, who ventriloquizes a wife chafing at her husband’s potential tyranny: “What if hee denie me the reasonable libertie which I desire, and should enjoy?” (45). As contributions to early modern “resistance theory,” Whately’s sermons were censored by early modern authorities who quickly recognized that the marital relationship functioned as code for the larger concerns of political life.

In fact, their domestic subject matter was a thin veil for their criticism of King James, an increasingly autocratic monarch who represented himself as husband to the nation. Because Puritan preachers reached scores of literate and illiterate women with their sermons, urging them “to listen with . . . diligence” (Whately 189), they opened spaces for female political engagement. By first establishing their associations with Puritan publishers, printers and dedicatees, I argue that Whately’s most prominent female contemporaries recirculated the analogy between political and domestic space common in oppositional Puritan discourse. Seeking to edify and persuade a larger audience through print or manuscript circulation, they deployed the religio-political resonance of the female voice strategically to offer sustained political critique. Building on scholars who recognize that so-called domestic texts can be read as highly politicized in early modern England, I argue that women writers’ uses of such tropes are a question less of gender than of the political and religious engagements they shared with their male contemporaries.

Christina's current work is editing "The Winter's Tale for the Cambridge Shakespeare Editions" and co-editing the works of Lady Anne Southweel for "The Other voice in Early Modern Europe."

Selected Publications

Books

• "The Winter's Tale for the Cambridgte Shakespeare Editions" - editor Feb 2024
• "The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe" -  written by Lady Anne Southwell, editor Christina Luckyj Feb 2024
• "Liberty and the Politics of the Female Voice in Early Stuart England." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
• "The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England." Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Co-Editors: Christina Luckyj and Niamh J. O'Leary. 
  *  Winner of Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Award for Best Collaborative Project published in 2017

Essays

• “The Querelle des Femmes, the Overbury Scandal and the Politics of the Swetnam Controversy in Early Modern England,” The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English 1540-1680, ed. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Danielle Clarke and Sarah C.E. Ross (Oxford University Press, in press).

Awards

• SSHRC Insight Grant (2013-18)
• Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship
• SSHRC Standard Research Grant
• Research and Development Fund Grants

McCulloch Professor Emerita

Email: marjorie.stone@dal.ca

Research Topics:

• Victorian Literature
• 19th Century Transatlantic Antislavery Literature
• Gender studies
• Literature and Medicine
• Literary Collaboration and Theory

Education:

• BA - Guelph
• MA, MPhil - Waterloo
• PhD - Toronto

My primary research interests lie in Victorian and Nineteenth-Century Studies, reflected in publications on Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Frederick Douglass, and Emily Dickinson, among other writers – especially Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB).  My fascination with EBB underlies the critical study Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1995), articles and essays about her writing and relationships with other authors, and collaborative editorial projects, including the five-volume Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2010). My interest in both the theory and practice of collaboration developed out of co-editing Writing Couples and the Construction of Authorship (2006). I also have long-standing interests in women’s writing more generally. Recently, I guest-edited a Forum on “Poetess Debates” for Victorian Review (Fall, 2022). Currently, I am working on a contracted essay on EBB’s Aurora Leigh in relation to nineteenth-century sex trafficking, and a book project on the creative processes revealed by her widely scattered poetical manuscripts.

Publications:

• “Witness Narratives and Working Class Suffering: “The Cry of the Children,” Corn Law Rhymes, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Unpublished Hunger Ballad.”  Victorian Studies, 62: 4 (2020): 616-43.
• ‘Not Death, but Love’: The Unmaking of ‘Sonnets in the night’ and the Making of Sonnets from the Portuguese.” Co-author Kirstie Blair, University of Glasglow. Poetry in the Making, ed. Daniel Tyler, Oxford University Press, 2020, 95-118.
• “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Unpublished Honeymoon Poem, a Poetics in Transition, and Petrarch’s Vaucluse: ‘Wilder ever still & wilder!’”. Co-author Beverly Taylor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Victorian Poetry, 57: (2019): 1-42.
• “Politics, Protest, Interventions: Beyond a Poetess Tradition.”  The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Poetry, ed. Linda K. Hughes.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 145-60.
• “Woman’s Powers” and Emily Dickinson’s “Queens”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot in 1861-62.” Special issue of Women’s Writing on “Generations.” Pub. Online October 2018.
• "The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning", 5 volumes. Co-editor for Volumes I, II and V. General Editor, Sandra Donaldson, Volume Editors: Rita Patteson, Marjorie Stone, & Beverly Taylor (London: Pickering and Chatto Press, 2010. Scholarly edition with critical introductions, extended headnotes, annotation and textual variants.

Professor Emerita

Email: Judith.thompson@dal.ca

Research Topics:

• Textual studies
• Romanticism
• European studies
• Literary theory
• Digital humanities
• History of the book

Education:

• BA - Western
• MA, PhD - Toronto

A Romanticist by profession and predilection, Judith Thompson hails from Ontario, where she received her BA from UWO in 1979. Six months wandering the moors and mountains of Britain and Europe, followed (and not completely undermined) by 7 years of grad school (at U of T), transformed her into a professor of British Romantic Literature, with a special interest in poetry and politics within the intersecting circles of the Romantic period. Her continuing and apparently permanent obsession is with the work of “Citizen John” Thelwall, the polymath poet, playwright, novelist, orator, radical political activist, pioneer speech therapist and maker of the English working class, a linchpin figure who “straddled the world of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the world of the Spitalfields weavers.”

Professor Thompson is a world leader in the rapidly expanding field of Thelwall Studies, and a founding member and official archivist of the John Thelwall Society. She edited Thelwall’s eccentric quasi-novel The Peripatetic in 2001, discovered a huge hidden cache of his unpublished poetry while Indiana Jonesing in the UK in 2004, and facilitated a world-premiere performance and video publication of his spectacular fantasy The Fairy of the Lake, in 2009.

In 2012 she published her revolutionary exposé of Thelwall’s role in Romanticism, John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner and in 2013 she co-edited Thelwall’s feminist-abolitionist-anti-imperialist novel The Daughter of Adoption. She has also written and published on genre and collaboration, and has a strong interest in women’s writing. She is currently editing John Thelwall’s Selected Poetry and Poetics; after that she seems fated to write the first modern biography of Thelwall and who knows, maybe even a screenplay (it's one of the best untold stories in English literary history!). In the meantime she keeps finding new stuff, generating more research ideas than she can ever follow up, and therefore seeking to pass the torch to younger hands.

Dr. Thompson is currently editing Thelwall’s newly-discovered poetry in print and electronic format, and gathering archival materials towards her biography of Thelwall. She is or has recently written or presented on Transatlantic Thelwall, Romantic Oratory, Thelwall and Dickens, Adoption in Romantic-era novels, and Arthurian rivalries in the Romantic period; and is or has recently supervised theses on Romantic-era Medicine, Atheist Nationalism, and the Female Voice.

Thompson is looking for grad students eager to forge forward into unexplored territory in such diverse Thelwallian fields as romantic theatre, radical medicine, speech poetics, popular performance, working class culture, collaborative authorship, the history of adult education, and the relation between generations, genders and genres in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As official archivist of the John Thelwall Society, Dr. Thompson is particularly interested in supervising editorial projects. If you work with Professor Thompson, you will have the rare opportunity to do truly pioneering research, even at the MA level; this was the case with Tara-Lynn Fleming, a chapter of whose 2006 MA thesis on Thelwall in the lyceum tradition was published in the first collection of scholarly essays on Thelwall in 2006.

McCulloch Emeritus, Professor in English

Email: andrew.wainwright@dal.ca

J.A. Wainwright is the author of five books of poetry, six novels, and two biographies, as well as numerous academic articles in refereed journals. His most recent fiction, "This Cleaving and This Burning", won the Guernica Prize in 2020. He taught in the Department of English for thirty years (1978-2008), including courses in creative writing and on the lyrics and music of Bob Dylan.