Medieval and Renaissance Studies in English
Graduate students with interests in Medieval and Renaissance studies will find a wide array of faculty and institutional resources at Tennessee. The Marco Institute is an interdisciplinary program that was recently awarded a three million dollar challenge grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Marco sponsors weekly discussion groups, a Friday tea, a spring colloquium, and research support, including sponsored graduate student travel to the Newberry and Folger Library. Additionally, all incoming students are encouraged to attend the bi-weekly graduate proseminar where they will meet graduate students and faculty from the other participating disciplines.
Medieval Studies has a long history at the University of Tennessee beginning with the tenure of the great Arthurian scholar J. Douglas Bruce who was head of the department from 1900 to 1923. Graduate students will find a library of primary and secondary literature in the field that is unsurpassed in the southeast as well as an active and collegial interdisciplinary faculty of almost twenty-five from six participating departments in the College of Arts and Science. The four faculty members in English (Dzon, Heffernan, Howes and Liuzza) have been the recipients of national and international awards. Graduate students in medieval have won departmental research awards, which provide the opportunity to work closely with professors on research and editorial projects. In addition to the M.A. and the PhD, a graduate student in English can now also receive a certificate in Medieval Studies. The journal Old English Newsletter (ed. Liuzza) provides additional internship opportunities for interested students.
The Renaissance group offers comprehensive training in the literature, the major cultural contexts, and the critical legacies of sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century England. Its faculty provides expertise in the dramatic and non-dramatic literature of the period, the major authors (such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton), and a full range of scholarly domains for study that includes, but is not exhausted by: the emerging tradition of women writers, Reformation studies, early modern poetics and linguistics, the changing dynamic of authorship, Renaissance musicology, natural philosophy and political philosophy, as well as contemporary critical theory and psychoanalysis. As a group, Drs. Jane Bellamy, Mary Dzon, Thomas Heffernan, Heather Hirschfeld, Laura Howes, Roy Liuzza, Robert Stillman and Anthony Welch are vitally involved in the intellectual and organizational work of Marco and regularly encourages exchange between and among the various disciplines that participate in it. It includes scholars whose work is internationally known, some of the Department’s most accomplished teachers.
