Susanne Wofford

The Mark Eccles Professor of English
Director of the Center for the Humanities
wofford@wisc.edu

Degrees and Institutions

PhD in Comparative Literature, Yale University, 1982
B. Phil. In General and Comparative Literature, Oxford University, 1977
B.A. summa cum laude in English and History, Yale C ollege, 1973

Research Interests

Shakespeare; Spenser; Renaissance and Classical Epic; Comparative European drama (esp. in England, France, Spain and Italy); Renaissance fiction and the novella; intercultural and transcultural studies of influence and literary relations; narrative and literary theory; theories of allegory, dramatic interpretation through performance.

Selected Publications

The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (1992); ed., Hamlet: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (1994); ed., Shakespeare: The Late Tragedies (1996); co-editor, Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Politics of Community (1999); articles on Spenser, Shakespeare, Ovid, Boccaccio and Botticelli, among others.

Current Projects

My current projects include a study of scenes of pretend death in Early Modern English theater, which looks in part of the roots of this convention in both Italian and other continental dramatic sources as well as in popular mummers plays (entitled: The Apparent Corpse: Popular and Transnational Bodies on the Shakespearean Stage) and a related project on Foreign Nationals: Intercultural Literacy and Literary Diaspora in Early Modern Europe.

University Service

I have served as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America, and on the Boards of the International Spenser Society and of the American Comparative Literature Association. I currently serve on the Advisory Board of the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) which can be found at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chci as well as on the MLA Divisional Executive Committee for the Division on Literature of the 16th century, excluding Shakespeare. I have served the UW-Madison campus as Chair of the Divisional Committee for Arts and Humanities, and was Director of Graduate Studies in English from 1995-99. I was part of the planning committee that helped to establish UW’s Center for Early Modern Studies, and currently serve on the advisory committee for that Center.

Teaching

I was recognized for my teaching at the UW-Madison with a Chancellor's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1998, and before that won three teaching awards while teaching at Yale University. In addition to my graduate and undergraduate teaching at the UW, I have regularly taught during the summer at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College in Vermont where I works closely a resident company of professional actors and with high school teachers from around the country. I have a great interest in teaching literary and dramatic interpretation through performance and have developed this as a sub-specialty in part through my years of work at Bread Loaf. I was the co-organizer of CLASSACT, a program that ran for about 6 years at the UW and brought MFA acting students into UW and some High School classrooms to teach interpretive method. My current undergraduate classes are English 417 and 418, which I teach almost every year, and English 381 (spring, 2007), a course on Tragedy and Justice for the Honors Program. Click here to see a description of that course. Most recent graduate courses include: “Shakespeare and Festivity,” “Shakespeare and the Mediterranean,” “The Italian Shakespeare,” “Renaissance Fiction,” and “Epic Homecomings.” In the fall of 2007 I will be teaching a graduate course on “Spenser, Ovid and the idea of epic.”

Personal Statement

Professor Wofford taught at Yale for a decade before joining the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a distinguished scholar of epic poetry and of Renaissance and Early Modern literature. Professor Wofford was recognized for her teaching at the UW-Madison with a Chancellor's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1998, and she has regularly taught during the summer at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College in Vermont where she works closely with high school teachers from around the country.

She has served the UW-Madison campus as Chair of the Divisional Committee for Arts and Humanities, and was Director of Graduate Studies in English from 1995-99. She also was the co-organizer of CLASSACT, a program that brought MFA actors into UW and some highschool classrooms. She was also Chair and co-organizer of the Early Modern Studies Group, one of the A.W. Mellon Foundation Interdisciplinary Workshops in the Humanities, which are administered by the Center for the Humanities.