updated 2026 June 16

BOOK CONTRACT (Cambridge University Press):

Learning to Love in Renaissance England (edited by William E. Engel, Rory Loughnane and Grant Williams), draws together leading scholars of early modern literature and culture to reconsider how the experience of falling in love was shaped by processes of instruction. In keeping with a print culture that popularised all manner of advice books and self-help practices, a wide range of conduct manuals and treatises on courtship assailed readers. Serving similar pedagogical and commercial interests, the period’s literature sought to frame and coach the experiences that would facilitate amorous attachments. This collection’s contribution to the topic is the argument that love was not just socially constructed, as is well documented in sexuality studies, but was learned and understood specifically through the premodern episteme, which revolved around the ancient notion of art, meaning know-how or craft. The present collection builds upon our previous studies – The Memory Arts in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 2016), The Death Arts in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 2022), and Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 2023) – that have foregrounded these fundamental categories of Renaissance knowing and doing, theory and praxis. 

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ON-GOING AND LONG RANGE BOOK PROJECTS

At the Limits of the Visible: Cognitive Ecologies in the Premodern Paperworld 

Slips of Thought from Chaucer to Milton: Imagining the stuff of allegory

Nineteenth Century Writers Reading Renaissance Texts: Poe, Melville, and Marx

Voices in Transit: dogs, death, dialect, and demons in the works of E. A. Poe

The Ubiquity of "Grace" in the Early Modern English Archive: A Philological Inquest

What the Pastoral Remembers: case studies from Theocritus to Wendell Berry

Regarding "What the Pastoral Remembers," I am interested in the allegorical face of nostalgia in works that lament the passing of an idealized vision of life in the world which at the same time celebrate the inevitability of its passing. In some cases, such as Walton's Compleat Angler, the reader temporarily is made to forget that a seismic shift in social and political order is the accidental midwife of this testament to the imagined simple pleasures of rural life. For example there is more than "beast fable" at work in his chapter on the natural beauty and predatory finesse of the otter which also is characterized as the bane of fishermen and farmers alike. 

Regarding "Slips of Thought," moving out from C. S. Lewis ( Studies in Words ) and William Empson (The Structure of Complex Words ); this project builds steadily on theories of language and culture put forward initially by Wilhelm von Humboldt (as a system which "makes infinite use of finite means"), Oswald Spengler ("the picture of history is a memory-picture"), and Ernst Cassirer ("the philosophy of symbolic forms"). By combining the approaches of philology, the memory arts, and iconography this book uncovers the wider implications of some terms that came to be taken for granted in everyday use and which thereby tended to slip their moorings - words such as "hap" and "hope," "breath" and "death," "sovereign" and "foreign," "moors" and "morris," "handle" and "hoard," "inly" and "only," and, by way of a suggestive coda, "conjecture." Taken together, these five chapters provide a more critical understanding of the strata of English poetic culture brought back into view by virtue of this endeavor to take core samples from the moraine of received linguistic history.

OTHER NOTIONS:

"Return to the Round River," based on my experiences as a teacher, youth worker, and Assistant Director at a camp a Northern Wisconsin,, this book considers an ecologically motivated model of learning that mobilizes ideas of the pastoral, giving priority to "teachable moments" in the course of authentic, hands-on learning experiences. This essentially holistic approach is offered as a corrective to the tendency to control and contain students in the service of "standards-based learning" and the "merit-badge" approach to credentialing them by way of narrowly defined skills-based instruction.

"Parallel Lives of Island Nations"  is modeled on the approach to writing popular biography pioneered by Plutarch. The lives of the notable and great were presented by weaving together what they were reported to have said and done. Jamaica, New Zealand (Aotearoa), and Iceland are the island nations whose stories this book sets out to tell. Among the exemplary lives paralleled are those of Marcus Garvey, one of the most powerful and controversial black rights activists of the twentieth century, and Bob Marley, the original ambassador of Reggae, whose music has become a symbol of unity and social change worldwide; Hone Heke, the Nhu Puhi warrior and first to sign the Treaty of Waitangi who later was to become the focal opponent of British occupation, and James Busby, the appointed British Resident who sought to broker peace between and among Maori tribes and the Pakeha commercial adventurers from Europe; and, from Iceland, Snorri Sturluson (born 1179), writer of the oral Edda and Heimskringla , and Vigdis Finnbogadottir, the world's first democratically elected female president whose sixteen years in that role makes her among the  then longest-serving elected female heads of state.