Habits of Reading in Early Modern England participants

These scholars participated in the 1997 Habits of Reading in Early Modern England (NEH Institute). For more past programming from the Folger Institute, please see the article Folger Institute scholarly programs archive.

Derek Alwes is Assistant Professor of English at Ohio State University/Newark. In his dissertation at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he investigated the publication and circulation of manuscripts in early modern England with particular emphasis on Sir Philip Sidney's attempts to fashion a sympathetic audience and limit the reception of his works to that private audience.

Jennifer Andersen is Assistant Professor of English at California State University at San Bernardino. She received her Ph.D. at Yale University in December 1996. In her dissertation, she examined the inscription of reading practices in texts as various as Ancrene Wisse (c.1215), The House of Fame, The Temple, Areopagitica, and "Upon Appleton House: To My Lord Fairfax" to document a decline in institutional dominance of literacy by the church, the subsequent rise of the state's influence, and the proliferation of reading audiences made possible by the invention of print.

Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Assistant Professorial Lecturer in History at George Washington University, examines the dissemination of information in seventeenth-century England in print and manuscript cultures. Her dissertation investigated the Privy Council's administration of the realm during Charles I's personal rule.

Anna Battigelli is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. She wrote her dissertation on Dryden's conception of his relationship with the readers of his elegies as that of the classical orator who makes sense of the political, religious, and social turmoil of his time.

Lana Cable, Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York at Albany, received the Milton Society's James Holly Hanford Award for Distinguished Book on John Milton for her volume, Carnal Rhetoric: Milton's Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire (Duke University Press, 1995). In that work, she explores the subversive side of Milton and its relation to the creative side, asserting that Milton needles away at complacency to get readers to think with him.

Lynne Dickson is Instructor of English at Chatham College in Pittsburgh. She studies the practices of coterie readers, the dynamics of print culture, and the effects of censorship. In her dissertation-in-progress with Ann Baynes Coiro at Rutgers, entitled "The Literary Envelope: Letters in the Texts of Gascoigne, Sidney, and Jonson," she is analyzing early modern letter-writing, handbooks, and epistolary "frames" as vehicles through which individuals negotiate their positions in society.

Craig Dionne, Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University, earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in Literary and Cultural Theory. At Carnegie Mellon University, he won the Adamson Award for Excellence in Writing three times. His current book-length project investigates the London print industry's function in shaping class-consciousness in its readers.

Judith A. Dorn is Assistant Professor of English at St.Cloud State University, where she teaches a course on women's adaptations of eighteenth-century concepts of reason. In her studies of novels and pamphlets regarding women, she argues that Lennox and Burney are engaged in epistemological and social investigations that center on women's ability to reason.

David R. Evans, Associate Professor of English at Cornell College, investigates books that concern English travelers to Italy, France, and other parts of Europe. His dissertation on Richard Lassels' The Voyage of Italy has yielded two articles on travel writings from the Grand Tour and on seventeenth-century politics.

Maura A. Henry is Lecturer on History and Women's Studies and Assistant Director of Women's Studies at Harvard University. In her dissertation, she studied the reading habits of the fourth Duchess of Beaufort, her daughter Lady Mary Somerset (later the Duchess of Rutland), and her granddaughter Lady Betty Compton (later Lady Cavendish) to demonstrate the vital role reading played in shaping both their class and gender.

Randall Ingram, Assistant Professor of English at Davidson College, earned his Ph.D. at Emory University. He researches the ways in which habits of reading in seventeenth-century England may have shaped early modern conventions of print authorship. In particular, he investigates early modern readers' approaches to collections of lyric poems, noting evidence in the marginalia of readers skipping about the volume as they saw fit.

Kirstie M. McClure is Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She teaches a year-long graduate course, "Politic Reading," on a range of postwar political theorists, historians, and literary theorists whose writings articulate relations between past and present, and history and theory, through their readings of historic texts.

Robert Steven Miola has taught in the Departments of Classics and English at Loyola College in Maryland where he is Gerard Manley Hopkins Chair of English. He is the author of four books, most recently Shakespeare's Reading, a volume in the series The Shakespeare Library from Oxford University Press. In this work, he is attending to the material form of the book, the processes of printing and distribution, the aesthetics and morality of reading, and the impact of censorship.

Andrea R. Nagy is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Sweet Briar College. She researches the first dictionaries in English, examining the ways the emergence of the dictionary changed, and perhaps weakened, the traditional experience of reading. She asserts that the early lexicographers Robert Cawdrey, John Bullokar, and Henry Cockeram offered their workbooks primarily as aids to reading. Her work charts the "prehistory" and formative history of dictionaries and literacy.

Lee Piepho, Shallenberger Brown Professor of English at Sweet Briar College, is completing a monograph on the reception of Mantuan's works in the literature of early sixteenth-century humanists in England and English Protestant reformers. His work in Neo-Latin studies includes a well-respected translation of Mantuan's Eclogues and a critical study of early annotations in editions and manuscripts of Mantuan. He has developed a framework for discussion of the reading of the Eclogues, the most widely taught Italian humanist texts in grammar schools of early modern England.

Elizabeth Sauer is Associate Professor of English at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. In studying early modern reading practices, she explores the connections and transitions from voice to script to print and from scribal communities to "communities of the book." In Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton's Epics (1996), she investigated the relative status and authority of the multiple narrative voices in Milton's Restoration poems.