Sylvia Brown
Associate Professor
PhD Princeton
Supervisory and research interests
I would be happy to supervise MA or PhD students working in the field of early modern literature and culture. I have a particular interest in women’s writing and gender, John Milton, John Bunyan, and book history and print culture in this period, and welcome students with complementary interests. Graduate students of mine work on topics like these: women and early modern travel; Milton and ecological thinking; Milton and print culture; sixteenth-century devotional handbooks; the writings of the Henrician martyr Anne Askew; the figure of the Amazon and Elizabeth I; and the ‘good wife’ in early modern domestic drama.
Courses taught
My undergraduate teaching regularly includes courses on Milton, Shakespeare, history of the book and print culture, and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and culture. My most recent senior seminars have been on the afterlife of "The Pilgrim’s Progress" (seventeenth-century to the present) and travel writing. I am offering once again (in Fall 2011) a senior seminar on revolution and print in the seventeenth century, English 424 <http://www.efs.ualberta.ca/Courses/English/SeniorEnglishCourses/400-levelCourseDescriptions.aspx>. My most recent graduate seminars were on "Milton and Print Culture" in 2010 and “Making Early Modern Travel Narratives” in 2008.
Representative publications if you want to get a sense of the work I do
"Bunyan and Empire." The Bunyan Handbook. Ed. Michael Davies. Forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
N. H., The Ladies Dictionary (1695). Eds. John Considine and Sylvia Brown. Forthcoming from Ashgate.
Women, Gender, and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Sylvia Brown. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
“The Reproductive Word: Gender and Textuality in the Writings of John Bunyan,” in Feminine Authority, Agency and Identity in Bunyan’s England, eds. Vera J. Camden and Kimberly S. Hill, a special issue of Bunyan Studies, 11(2003/2004), 23-45.
“Women and the Godly Art of Rhetoric: Robert Cawdrey’s Puritan Dictionary.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 41.1 (Winter 2001), 133-48.
Women’s Writing in Stuart England: The Mothers’ Legacies of Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Joscelin and Elizabeth Richardson. Ed. Sylvia Brown. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1999).
Remarks on what I am doing at the moment
I am at putting to bed an edition of Mary Love’s manuscript life her husband Christopher Love, to be published by the London Record Society (with Boydell & Brewer). By the end of 2011, I hope to have finished a long-in-the-works monograph, titled Household Reformations: Women, Textual Culture, and the Survival of Protestantism.