Deanne Williams specializes in Medieval and Renaissance literature, especially Shakespeare, and is the author of pioneering work in the new field of Girls’ Studies. She is the author of The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2004), which won the Roland H. Bainton Prize for best book in literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood (Palgrave, 2014), and, most recently, Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Bloomsbury, 2023). She is co-editor, with Ananya Jahanara Kabir, of Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge, 2005), and, with Kaara L. Peterson, of The Afterlife of Ophelia (Palgrave, 2012). She is editor of a special issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation on Girls and Girlhood in Adaptations of Shakespeare (2015) and co-editor, with Richard Preiss, of Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2017). She has also published over thirty articles on a wide range of topics, including Shakespeare adaptations, the history of feminist scholarship, and the reception of classical and medieval literature in the Renaissance. In 2003, she won the John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature, and she has received research fellowships from Trinity College, Cambridge, Clare Hall, Cambridge, the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She has been visiting professor at the University of Lund, University of Barcelona, University of Florence, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität of Mainz and the University of Auckland, where she held the 2018 Alice Griffin Fellowship.

Her current research on medieval and early modern girlhood has been supported by two 5-year SSHRC Insight Grants, in 2014 and 2019, as well as a two-year Killam Research Fellowship (2018-2020). In 2017 she was elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. In 2019 she won York University’s President’s Research Excellence Award. In 2019 she founded the Girls’ Studies Research Network at York University. She is currently a fellow and member of the Executive Committee of the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at the University of Toronto. With Professor John Stone of the University of Barcelona she is currently working on a new project, Shakespeare and Diasporic Book History in Spain and Portugal, 1592-1820, supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant.

Research Interests

Upcoming Courses

Deanne Williams specializes in Medieval and Renaissance literature, especially Shakespeare, and is the author of pioneering work in the new field of Girls’ Studies. She is the author of The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2004), which won the Roland H. Bainton Prize for best book in literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood (Palgrave, 2014), and, most recently, Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Bloomsbury, 2023). She is co-editor, with Ananya Jahanara Kabir, of Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge, 2005), and, with Kaara L. Peterson, of The Afterlife of Ophelia (Palgrave, 2012). She is editor of a special issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation on Girls and Girlhood in Adaptations of Shakespeare (2015) and co-editor, with Richard Preiss, of Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2017). She has also published over thirty articles on a wide range of topics, including Shakespeare adaptations, the history of feminist scholarship, and the reception of classical and medieval literature in the Renaissance. In 2003, she won the John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature, and she has received research fellowships from Trinity College, Cambridge, Clare Hall, Cambridge, the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She has been visiting professor at the University of Lund, University of Barcelona, University of Florence, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität of Mainz and the University of Auckland, where she held the 2018 Alice Griffin Fellowship.

Her current research on medieval and early modern girlhood has been supported by two 5-year SSHRC Insight Grants, in 2014 and 2019, as well as a two-year Killam Research Fellowship (2018-2020). In 2017 she was elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. In 2019 she won York University’s President’s Research Excellence Award. In 2019 she founded the Girls’ Studies Research Network at York University. She is currently a fellow and member of the Executive Committee of the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at the University of Toronto. With Professor John Stone of the University of Barcelona she is currently working on a new project, Shakespeare and Diasporic Book History in Spain and Portugal, 1592-1820, supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant.

Degrees

Appointments

Research Interests

Upcoming Courses