Margaret Maurer

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mmaurer

Margaret Maurer

William Henry Crawshaw Professor of Literature

Department/Office Information

English and Creative Writing
311 Lathrop Hall
  • TWR 3:00pm - 4:00pm (311 Lathrop Hall)

I study things that resist the coherence that we try to impose on them through interpretation. The best thing about Colgate is that it attracts students who are intelligent enough and playful enough to cope with that when I insist they do — and remind me of it when I forget.

  • BA Seton Hill College 1969
  • PhD Cornell University 1973

Instructor in English, The University of New Orleans 1973-74

Shakespeare, 16th- and early 17th-century English literature, literary biography

Shakespeare, 16th- and early 17th-century English literature, patronage (Lucy Russell, wife of the third Earl of Bedford), invention of printing, editing and transmission of English Renaissance texts

  • Three Shrew Plays: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew with the Anonymous The Taming of a Shrew, and Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, ed. Barry Gaines and Margaret Maurer (Indianapolis:  Hackett Publishing, 2010)
  • "Putting the Silent Woman Back into the Shakespearean Shrew, in Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives, 1500-1700, ed. David Wooton and Graham Holderness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), (with Barry Gaines)
  • •Again, Poets and Julius Caesar," The Upstart Crow, 28 (2009)
  • “Poetry and Scandal: John Donne’s ‘A Hymne to the Saynts and to the Marquesse Hamilton,’” John Donne Journal 26 (2007), 1-33
  • “Teaching and Risk: Doing and Undoing Shakespeare.” With D. Kay Johnston, in For All Time? Critical Issues in Teaching Shakespeare, book on teaching Shakespeare. Eds. Paul Skrebels and Sieta van der Hoeven. Kent Town, Australia: Wakefield Press, 2002. 100-11.
  • "Constering Bianca: The Taming of the Shrew and The Women's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed" (Medieval and Renaissance Drama in English, 14, 2001)
  • "Francis Bacon's 'Of Revenge': a short take on teaching Hamlet in Approaches to Teaching Hamlet, ed. Bernice Kliman (MLA, 2001)
  • "The Rowe Editions of 1709/1714 and 3.1 of The Taming of the Shrew" in Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joanna Gondris (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998)
  • "Facing the Music in Arden: "Twas I, but 'Tis Not I,'" in As You Like It from 1600 to the Present, ed. Edward Tomarken (Garland, 1997)
  • "Figure, Place, and the End of The Two Gentlemen of Verona," in Texts and Pretexts in the English Renaissance, ed. Marion Trousdale (Style, 23, 1989)
  • "Reading Ben Jonson's Queens," in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writing: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, eds. Sheila Fisher and Janet E. Halley (University of Tennessee Press, 1989)
  • "The Poetical Familiarity of John Donne's Letters," in The Forms of Power in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Pilgrim Books, 1982)
  • "The Circular Argument of Donne's 'La Corona'" (Studies in English Literature, 22, 1982)
  • "The Real Presence of Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, and the Terms of John Donne's 'Honour Is So Sublime Perfection'" (ELH, 47, 1980)
  • "Samuel Daniel's Poetical Epistles, Especially Those to Sir Thomas Egerton and Lucy, Countess of Bedford" (Studies in Philogy, 74, 1977)
  • "John Donne's Verse Letters" (Modern Language Quarterly, 37, 1976)

“The Verse Letter in the English Renaissance,” David Novarr, director 

Selected Recent Conference Presentations

  • •“John Donne, Occasional Poet,” annual meeting of the John Donne Society, February 2010
  • Seminar leader: The Shakespearean Crux: Seminar at the 2009 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, with Stephen Foley, Brown University
  • “Teaching through Performance: Making the Best of a Good Thing,” annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, April 2007
  • “Donne’s Peculiar Genre: The Verse Letter,” annual meeting of the Renaissance Society
  • of America, Miami, March 2007
  • “Putting the Silent Woman Back into the Shakespearean Shrew,” with Barry Gaines,
  • Special conference, Shrews on the Renaissance Stage, York, England, May 2006
  • “John Donne’s Verse Letters: What Needs to Be Done,” annual meeting of the
  • Renaissance Society of America, San Francisco, March 2006
  • “Donne’s Anniversary Letters,” annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Cambridge, England, April 2005
  • “Donne and Such Readers as He Can Teach,” plenary address to the John Donne Society Conference, February 2004
  • Resident Scholar,  Folger NEH Teaching Shakespeare Institute, Washington, D.C.,  2010, 2008, 2006, 2004, 2002, 2000, 1998, and 1996
  • NEH Summer Institute, Center for Renaissance and Shakespearean Staging, 1995
  • NEH Summer Seminar, "Renaissance Self-fashioning," 1978
  • Woodrow Wilson Designate, NDEA-HSS Fellow, Cornell University 1969-1973