Patrick Collinson, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, Emeritus, and author of The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967), The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559-1625 (1979), and The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1988).
Eamon Duffy, Director of Studies in Theology at Magdalene College, Cambridge and author of The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (1992). He is a founding member of the Editorial Board of the journal The Seventeenth Century.
Lori Anne Ferrell, Associate Professor of History at the Claremont Graduate School, and coeditor, with David Cressy, of Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Source Book (1996).
Christopher Haigh, Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Oxford and author of English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (1993) and Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (1975).
Peter Lake, Professor of History at Princeton University, author of Anglicans and Puritans?: Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (1988), and coeditor, with Kevin Sharpe, of Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (1994).
Barbara Lewalski, Kenan Professor of English Literature at Harvard University, and author of Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (1979), Writing Women in Jacobean England, 1603-1625 (1993), and "Paradise Lost" and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (1985).
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lecturer in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford and author of Thomas Cranmer: A Life (1996) and Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County 1500-1600 (1986).
Janel Mueller, William Rainey Harper Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago and editor of Modern Philology and author of Donne's Prebend Sermons (1971). She is currently editing the works of Queen Elizabeth and of Katherine Parr.
James Shapiro, Professor of English at Columbia University, author of Shakespeare and the Jews (1996) and Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (1991).
Debora Shuger, Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (1988), Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (1990), and The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Subjectivity, and Sacrifice (1994).
Laetitia Yeandle, Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, coauthor of two handbooks on English paleography in the early modern period, and coeditor of The Journal of John Winthrop (1997).
Ana Mercedes Acosta received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 1997 and has just completed her first year as an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY College at Buffalo. She is preparing her dissertation on "Revolutionary Visions: Between Genesis and Utopia" for publication. With a study of the ways in which authors ranging from Milton to Mary Shelley reinterpreted and recast the Bible, she demonstrates that a wealth of perspectives, positions, and beliefs are not comprehended in historical models of linear continuity and progression towards secularization.
Jennifer Andersen is an Assistant Professor of English at California State University at San Bernadino. She received her Ph.D. from Yale in 1996. Professor Andersen is coediting a volume of essays generated by her colleagues in the 1997 NEH summer institute directed by Steven Zwicker, "Habits of Reading in Early Modern England." Her dissertation examined changing perspectives on the purposes of reading from pre- to post-Reformation England. Her current research focuses upon literary responses to the threat of separatism that Puritanism posed to a comprehensive sense of church. She seeks to locate symptoms of anxiety or of recuperation in the works of Donne, Herbert, Burton, Webster, Middleton, Crashaw, and Traherne.
Paula S.D. Barker is an Associate Professor of Historical Theology at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where she is currently redesigning a core course on the origins and development of Anglicanism. In 1990, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. In 1993, she was ordained as an Episcopal priest. Professor Barker's early scholarship focused upon the resistance to the Lutheran Reformation by such figures as Nuremberg abbess Caritas Pirckheimer, who refused to allow her convent to be closed. Her more recent research on English topics includes Richard Hooker's concept of participation in God and the appropriation of late medieval mystical theology by the recusants Augustine Baker and Gertrude More.
Tom Bishop is an Associate Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, where he is also director of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities. In his book Shakespeare and the Theater of Wonder (1996), he examined the relations of charismatic experience to theatrical fictions. In general, he is interested in the ways in which the category of the sacred can provide an orientation for reading Shakespeare. In particular, he is interested in how contemporary readings of the Bible and para-Biblical works, such as those by Foxe and Calvin, shaped early readers' expectations about the power of texts to gather and illuminate patterns of experience.
Elizabeth Burow-Flak is an Assistant Professor of English at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana. In 1997, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, where she coauthored a textbook for first-year writing students. Professor Burow-Flak is currently revising her dissertation for publication. In it she connects two trends in seventeenth-century women's writings: the increase in printed works by women and a tendency by women writers to equate print authorship with sainthood. In case studies of such authors as Aemelia Lanyer, Anna Trapnel, Anne Bradstreet, and Mary Rowlandson, she finds the writer's self-representation shaped by the conventions of hagiography.
Susan E. Dinan received her Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and is an Assistant Professor of History at the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University. A scholar of the counter-Reformation in seventeenth-century France, Professor Dinan examines the confraternity of the Daughters of Charity who avoided the Council of Trent's dictated enclosure of all religious women. In the ability of the Daughters of Charity to both challenge and cultivate the ideals of the Catholic Reformation, Professor Dinan finds exemplary tensions and balances between local initiative and institutional controls and between clergy and laity for the authority to define the sacred.
Karen Guest is an Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown College in Kentucky. She has a strong background in imperial and Asian history, but the subject of her Ph.D. dissertation, at the University of Virginia, was the oppositional relationship between Bishops Thomas Cranmer and Stephen Gardiner over almost every issue of the Henrician reformation. Her current project studies Gardiner's use of traditional protestant "weapons" such as vernacular language, patristics, and scripture in resistance to evangelical religious practices in the early Reformation. Her next project will be a biography of another bishop, Gilbert Burnet.
Elena Levy-Navarro wrote her dissertation at Yale under the direction of Thomas Greene. She is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. Her scholarly interests center upon how members of the Church of England reconciled Calvinist doctrine with inherited Catholic rituals. How, she asks, do different individuals conceive of their Church Settlement? Her book-length study of John Donne demonstrates that while he supports the broad outlines of the Jacobean Church settlement, Donne is also careful in sermons to restrict the King's authority to the civil sphere, thus reserving for preachers like himself the real divine authority of the church.
Catherine M. A. McCauliff holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Toronto and a J.D. from the University of Chicago. She is Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law, where she teaches a course on English legal history, in addition to standard business law courses. The treason trials of More, Laud, and Charles II and their religious contexts are one of the topics she teaches; an examination of the founding of Newark, NJ, by Connecticut dissenters in 1666 is another. She is currently designing a new humanities seminar for law students that would explore the interrelationships of the sacred with public and private law in seventeenth-century England.
Debra A. Meyers is an Assistant Professor of History at the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University, where she is a member of a committee exploring the feasibility of a religious studies program. She received her Ph.D. in history in 1997 from the University of Rochester. Professor Meyers is currently revising her dissertation, "Religion, Women, and the Family in Maryland, 1634-1713." She reconstructs the mentalité of early modern Marylanders on the basis of such documents as wills, gravestone verses, court records, and family genealogies. Among other things, she traces the impact of piety on familial relations, as manifest in property distribution.
Maryclaire Moroney, Associate Professor of English at John Carroll University, received her Ph.D. in English from Harvard University in 1991. She has published on Spenser and is currently writing a book that investigates early modern Britain's self-construction after the Dissolution as expressed through literary and antiquarian representations of the medieval past. She examines the way such authors as Bale, Spenser, Herrick, and Dugdale test the literary and figurative boundaries between secular and sacred spaces, and she compares the rhetoric of these discussions with those concerning "unreformable" Ireland.
Scott R. Pilarz, S.J., is an Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University. In addition to degrees in philosophy, divinity, and theology, he obtained a Ph.D. in English in 1996 from the City University of New York. He wrote his dissertation on John Donne's and Robert Southwell's understanding of the nature and function of the priesthood, an institution much affected by the Reformation. A study of Southwell's spiritual and intellectual formation is among his works-in-progress. In the Institute, he hopes to find pedagogical strategies with which to complicate his students' Whiggish notions of the Reformation.
Colleen M. Seguin is a Lilly Fellow in the Humanities and Arts at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana. In 1997, she received her Ph.D in history from Duke University. In a revision of her dissertation, "'Addicted Unto Piety': Catholic Women in England, 1590-1690," Professor Seguin challenges contemporary readings of the early modern patriarchy with an examination of the quietly efficacious and pragmatic activism of pious recusant women (wives, penitents, mothers, and nuns). She looks forward to a summer with such basic research tools as the Calendar of State Papers near at hand.
Olga Valbuena, an Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University, received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. The book she is currently researching, "Equivocal Subjects: Writing and Resistance to Tyranny in Early Modern England," explores the use of oppositional religious discourse as a justification for opposing tyranny. She locates narrative and political resistance within texts by Shakespeare, Cary, Donne, and Milton to make the case that a climate of repression and self-censorship invited authors to engage in a productive concealment that might protect the boundaries of interpretation while still allowing for the expression of individual conscience.
John N. Wall is a Professor of English at North Carolina State University, with a Master's of Divinity from the Episcopal Theological School. He returns to full-time teaching in the fall after years of administrative work. Author of Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan (1988), Professor Wall has published widely on subjects that include Shakespeare, Erasmus, Hooker, and the Book of Common Prayer. His current research project is a study of Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions in its literary, spiritual, and social contexts. He argues that Donne's pastoral style--one that ministers by being ministered to--derives from Reformation interpretations of sickness as a visitation from God.
Jeffrey M. Wheeler is a Visiting Professor of English
at Pepperdine University. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University
of Southern California in 1996, where his dissertation had a bibliography
that looks very much like the Institute's list of visiting faculty. He
is currently revising the dissertation for publication with the tentative
title of Firebrands of Reform. In it, he examines the transformation
of popular medieval religious forms, especially religious relics, into
points of Protestant attack. In the course of the summer, he hopes to focus
on the strategic deployment of Protestant hagiography, replete with polemical
humor, in the works of Bale and Foxe.
