Elizabeth Fowler

(2000)
Associate Professor
Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Degrees

Ph.D. Harvard, 1992
A.M. Harvard, 1987

A.B. Brown, 1985

Interests

I love reading poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to Seamus Heaney together with students (as well as with my family).  My scholarship concerns English writing from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries in the context of other cultural practices.  A persistent ambition of mine is to develop literary methods of analysis so that they can be used to illuminate topics that require the collaboration of many different disciplines; thus my first book theorizes the relation of ‘literary character’ to representations of the person in law, philosophy, and economics.  In considering the ethics and politics of notions of the person, the nature of political thought as it occurs in the arts, and the bodily and social effects of poetic art, I strive for an intensely literary methodology that has cross-disciplinary force and importance.

Books

  • General Editor with Patrick Cheney, Joseph Loewenstein, David Miller and Andrew Zurcher, The Oxford Collected Works of Spenser (Oxford University Press, in progress).
  • With Sondra Archimedes, Laura Runge and Philip Schwyzer, Teaching with the Norton Anthology of English Literature: A Guide for Instructors (Norton, 2006).
  • Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing (Cornell University Press, 2003); honorable mention for the MacCaffrey medal 2005 (International Spenser Society).
  • Editor with Roland Greene, The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge University Press, 1997, reissued in paperback, 2007).

Articles

  • "Shylock’s Virtual Injuries," Shakespeare Studies 34 (2006).
  • "Macbeth and the Rhetoric of Political Forms" in Shakespeare and Scotland, ed. Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
  • "Chaucer and the Elizabethan Invention of the ‘Selfe’ " in Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney and Anne Lake Prescott (MLA, 2000).
  • "The Ship Adrift" in "The Tempest" and its Travels, ed. William H. Sherman and Peter Hulme (Reaktion Books, 2000).
  • "The Romance Hypothetical: Lordship and the Saracens in Sir Isumbras" in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Jane Gilbert and Ad Putter (Longman, 2000).
  • "The Empire and the Waif: Consent and Conflict of Laws in the Man of Law’s Tale" in Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry, ed. David Aers (D. S. Brewer, 2000).
  • "The Rhetoric of Political Forms: Social Persons and the Criterion of Fit in Colonial Law, Macbeth, and The Irish Masqve at Covrt," in Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ed. Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (University of Delaware Press, 2000).
  • "Chaucer’s Hard Cases" in Medieval Crime and Social Control, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
  • "The Afterlife of the Civil Dead: Conquest in The Knight’s Tale" in Critical Essays on Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Thomas C. Stillinger (G.K. Hall, 1998).
  • "Civil Death and the Maiden: Agency and the Conditions of Contract in Piers Plowman," Speculum (1995).
  • "The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser," Representations (1995).
  • "Misogyny and Economic Person in Skelton, Langland, and Chaucer," Spenser Studies (1992); reprinted in Derek Pearsall, ed., From Chaucer to Spenser: A Critical Reader (Blackwell’s, 1999)
  • "Authenticity and Corporate Forms in the Imagination of Feminism," in Harvard Women’s Law Journal (1991).

Reviews and Review Essays

  • On A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England, by Richard Firth Green, in Speculum 78 (2003): 179-82
  • On Essays on Richardian Literature: In Honour of J. A. Burrow, ed. A. J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, Medium Ævum LXIX.i (2000), 131-32
  • On The Custom of the Castle from Malory to Macbeth, by Charles Ross, in Modern Philology 98.1 (August 2000), 19-21
  • On Reading the Renaissance: Culture, Poetics, and Drama, ed. Jonathan Hart, in Shakespeare Studies 27 (1999): 239-45
  • On The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital, by Richard Halpern, in The Spenser Newsletter (Spring 1994)
  • “Authenticity and Corporate Forms in the Imagination of Feminism,” in Harvard Women’s Law Journal Vol. 13 (Spring 1991), 266–76

Audio Interviews

Invited Lectures

  • “Incapable Subjects in the Scene of Contract.” UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Symposium on Gender in Law and Other Literatures, May 2008
  • “Reading and Writing Lycidas.” The Northeast Milton Seminar, Wheaton College, April 2006
  • “The Virtual Elegy.” The Robert Kellogg Lecture in Medieval Studies, University of Virginia, March 2006
  • “The Habit of Justice.” Duke University, Department of English, April 2003
  • “Workshop in Law and Literature.” Duke University, Department of English, April 2001
  • “Disposition.” Harvard University, Medieval Colloquium, October 1999; The Newberry Library, Chicago, October 1999
  • “The Rhetoric of Political Forms.” University of Chicago, Renaissance Workshop, October 1999
  • “The Art of Death in the Knight’s Tale.” University of Virginia, Department of English, March 1999; Vanderbilt University, Department of English, January 1999; University of Washington, Department of English, January 1999
  • “Chaucer’s Arcite and the Memorial Forms of Social Life.” Tucker-Cruse Lecture, University of Bristol, December 1997
  • “The Romance of Consent: Shakespeare, Thought Experiments in Gender, and the Canon of Political Philosophy Before Hobbes.” Roehampton Institute, London, December 1997; Harvard University, Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, October 1997

Conference Papers

  • “The Disposition of the Bedchamber.” New Chaucer Society, New York, July 2006
  • “The Impression of Grief.” International Spenser Society, Toronto, May 2006
  • “‘Do You Confess the Bond?’: Towards a History of Performativity.” Shakespeare Association of America, Philadelphia, April 2006
  • “A Room for the Vewe.” Modern Language Association, Washington, D. C., December 2000 (Spenser Society)
  • “The Art of Death in the Knight’s Tale.” MLA, San Francisco, December 1998 (Chaucer Division)
  • “The Creation of Persons.” MLA, San Francisco, December 1998 (Division of Renaissance Literature)

Honors

  • Visiting Faculty, The Paul Mellon Centre for British Studies, London, England, 1997.
  • Isabel MacCaffrey Prize, International Spenser Society, 1997.
  • Yale’s Poorvu Prize for Interdisciplinary Teaching, 1997.
  • Junior Fellow, The Society of Fellows, Harvard University, 1991–1993, 1994–1995.
  • American Council of Learned Societies International Travel Grant, 1994.
  • Whiting Fellow, 1990–1991.
  • Harvard’s Danforth Distinction in Teaching Prize, 1990.
  • Fulbright Scholar, London, England, 1989–1990.
  • Frances A. Yates Fellow, The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1989.