Associate Professor, English
School of Humanities

Renaissance/Early Modern literature; memory and mnemonics; poetics, literary theory and practice; ruins

Research Profile and Links

Research Gate Profile

Academia.edu profile

My research focuses on the role of memory and mnemonics -- colloquially called "the art of memory" -- in Renaissance / Early Modern English literary theory and practice, and the ways in which this mnemonic poetics pervades English writing. My current book project, tentatively titled “The Art of Memory and The Art of Writing in Early Modern England: Poetics of Ruin and Recollection,” looks at the ways in which mnemonic poetics – the classical use of space or place and vivid images to make poetry memorable, and to provide a mental map for its recollection – pervades the writing of Early Modern England, and provides a theory of poetics that a range of authors (including Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare) make central to their literary practice. This project extends the work of my first book, Spenser’s Ruins and The Art of Recollection, which explores the reception of classical mnemonic poetics in prose as well as poetry and in a range of fields – including philosophy, rhetoric, theology, history, science, and so on – and their influence on the writing of one of early modern England’s most important poets, Edmund Spenser. I’m also interested in contemporary representations of locational memory, and the ways in which a classical and early modern mnemonic poetics can be connected to modern and post-modern concerns with remembering the past in the present.

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=5133

Last updated
05/20/2024