Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Future of Literary History: A Discussion
Date and Time
WOMEN, GENDER, AND CULTURE IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD
SPEAKERS: Lara Dodds, Mississippi State University; Michelle Dowd, University of Alabama; Erin Murphy, Boston University; Sarah Wall-Randall, Wellesley College
Registration information forthcoming
Lara Dodds specializes in seventeenth-century literature, with a particular focus on Milton and on early modern women’s writing. She is the author of The Literary Invention of Margaret Cavendish (Duquesne UP, 2013) which describes Cavendish’s debts to English Renaissance Literature, with a particular focus on Cavendish’s critical appropriation of works by Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, and Milton. She has also published essays on Milton and early modern literature and science.
Her most recent monograph, co-authored with Michelle Dowd, is Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Future of Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2025). This book provides a synthesis and reassessment of the state of the field for early modern women’s writing and argues that a full accounting of early modern women’s literary and creative activities is necessary to the future of literary studies as a broader field.
In her current book project Science Fiction and the Fall, she traces the debts to Milton’s Paradise Lost in 20th and 21st century science fiction.
Michelle Dowd is Hudson Strode Professor of English and Director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies. She received her BA summa cum laude from the University of Rochester in 1997 and her PhD from Columbia University in 2003. She specializes in early modern literature, with concentrations in Tudor and Stuart drama, Shakespeare, and early modern women’s writing.
Professor Dowd’s first monograph, Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2009), won the Sara A. Whaley Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association. Her second monograph, The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge, 2015) offers a new understanding of how the theater, England’s most vibrant cultural institution in the Renaissance, shaped attitudes about primogeniture, one of the country’s most longstanding economic systems. Her most recent monograph, co-authored with Lara Dodds, is Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Future of Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2025). This book provides a synthesis and reassessment of the state of the field for early modern women’s writing and argues that a full accounting of early modern women’s literary and creative activities is necessary to the future of literary studies as a broader field.
Current projects include a book under contract for the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series on Shakespeare and Work. Professor Dowd also edits a book series, Strode Studies in Early Modern Literature and Culture, published by the University of Alabama Press. She has held fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (at the Newberry Library).