A Renaissance Woman Adrift in the World

Abstract

For a variety of reasons, the breadth of courses that many early modernists teach is much greater than they anticipated, particularly for those who finished graduate school a number of decades ago. As department sizes shrink and full-time faculty are replaced by much cheaper part-time or non-tenure track instructors, many people are asked to teach courses for which they have no graduate training, not simply in a closely related field (Milton along with Shakespeare, the Middle Ages along with the Renaissance and Reformation) but in completely different cultural traditions or time periods. As more and more colleges and universities, particularly in the United States and Canada, add world history or world literature to courses in Western Civilization or American and English Literature, historians and literary scholars are increasingly required to become comparativists, or to teach about cultures in which they have little background. This drive to expand geographically has also come from inside as well as outside for many of us, as we increasingly have found teaching courses that focus only on Europe unsatisfying.