Dr Bethany Dubow, Faculty of English
bd351@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
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I did my undergraduate in English at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, before joining Somerville College, University of Oxford, for a Masters in English Literature (1550-1700). I returned to the University of Cambridge for my PhD, this time a member of King’s. From January-September 2023, I will be an AHRC Posdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. In October 2023, I will join New College, University of Oxford, as Salvesen Junior Research Fellow.
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Research Interests
My research tracks relations – and agitations – between geometry, ecology and early modern English poetics. My PhD, on the ‘stranger mathematics’ of The Faerie Queene (1590;1596), reveals how Spenser’s verse geometries shape a poetic world that qualifies, even rivals, contemporary cosmic models. I am currently preparing the monograph based on this thesis for publication under the (provisional) title: Shape, Misshaped: Sixteenth-Century Poetics, Mathematics and The Faerie Queene. I have also begun work on my second book-length project: Early Modern Ecopoetics.
In 2023, my study of Spenser’s ‘toadstool poetics’ was awarded the ISS Isabel MacCaffrey Prize for the best essay on Spenser published in 2021-22.
Selected Publications
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‘“Roote out those odde rymes”! The unruly matter of early modern English verse’, in Special Forum: Early English New Materialisms, ed. Adin Lears and Tekla Bude, Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory (2023) ‘Toadstool Poetics: Alliteration in The Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies 36 (2022), 91-135 ‘Fractal Geometry in Errour’s Den’ in Kirsten Schuhmacher et al., ‘Spenserian Futures’, Spenser Review 50 (Fall 2020), (with Bonnie Lander Johnson) ‘Allegories of Creation: Glassmaking, Forests and Fertility in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi’, Renaissance Drama 45, no. 1 (Spring, 2017), 107-37 Forthcoming ‘A Fruitful-Headed Beast? Rhyme in The Faerie Queene’, in Spenser and Animal Life, ed. Abigail Shinn and Rachel Stenner (Palgrave, exp. 2023) |
