Deanne Williams
Professor
Office: Atkinson Building, 708
Phone: (416)736-2100 Ext: 44752
Email: dmw@yorku.ca
Media Requests Welcome
Accepting New Graduate Students
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
Ph.D. English Literature, Stanford UniversityM.Phil. Medieval English Literature, Oxford University
B.A. English Literature and Religious Studies, University of Toronto
Appointments
Faculty of Fine ArtsResearch Interests
Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood. Palgrave, 2014 (277 pp.)
The Afterlife of Ophelia. Co-editor, with Kaara Peterson. Palgrave, 2012.
The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, 2004. Paperback, 2006.
Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures. Co-editor, with Ananya Jahanara Kabir. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
“Isabelle de France: Child Bride” The Perilous Narrow Ocean: French Connections in the Renaissance ed. Hassan Melehy and Catherine Gimelli Martin. Ashgate, 2013. pp. 27-50.
“Enter Ofelia Playing on a Lute.” The Afterlife of Ophelia. Palgrave, 2012. pp. 119-137.
“Medievalism in English Renaissance Literature.” in A Companion to Tudor Literature ed. Kent Cartwright. (Blackwell, 2010) : 213-228.
“Boethius Our Contemporary: The Consolatio in Medieval and Early Modern England.” in The Erotics of Consolation ed. Catherine Léglu and Steve Milner. Palgrave, 2008: 205-226.
“Roussillon and Retrospection in All’s Well That Ends Well. ” in Representing France in the English Renaissance ed. Jean-Christophe Meyer. University of Delaware Press, 2008: 171-192.
“Elizabeth I: Size Matters.” Goddesses and Queens: The Iconography of Elizabeth I ed. Lisa Hopkins and Annaliese Connolly. Manchester University Press, 2007: 69-80.
“Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and the Rhetoric of Temporality.” Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England ed. David Matthews and Gordon McMullan. Cambridge University Press, 2007: 31-50.
“No Man’s Elizabeth: Frances Yates and the History of History.” The Impact of Feminism on Renaissance Scholarship ed. Dympna Callaghan. Palgrave, 2007: 238-58.
“All’s Well That Ends Well and the Art of Retrograde Motion.” All’s Well That Ends Well: New Critical Essays ed. Gary Waller. Routledge, 2006: 152-170.
“Gower’s Monster.” Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures. Cambridge University Press, 2005: 127-50.
“The Dream Visions.” Yale Companion to Chaucer ed. Seth Lerer. Yale University Press, 2005: 147-78.
“Introduction: A Return to Wonder” co-authored with Ananya Kabir. Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures: 1-24.
Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches ed. Susanna Fein and David Raybin. Penn State University Press, 2009. Speculum 87 (2012): 1191-2.
Shakespeare and the Middle Ages ed. Curtis Perry and John Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Renaissance Quarterly 63:2 (Summer 2010): 701-3.
Renaissance Medievalisms. Ed. Konrad Eisenbichler. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009. Renaissance Quarterly 62:4 (Winter, 2009).
Alfred Thomas, A Blessed Shore. England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007). Renaissance Quarterly 61 (Spring, 2008): 659-660.
Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Speculum 83 (Spring, 2008): 440-441.
Richard Helgerson, Joachim du Bellay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Reformation 12 (2007): 220-222
Roland Greene, Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Sidney Journal vol. 18 no. 2. (2001) : 89-93.
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004). The National Post, October 23, 2004.
Edward Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). Sidney Journal vol. 17 no. 2 (2000): 91-2.
Georgiana Donavin, Incest Narratives and the Structure of Gower’s Confessio Amantis (English Literary Studies Monograph no. 56. Victoria, BC, 1993) Notes and Queries vol. 42 no. 3 (1995): 84.
“What Shakespeare Did to Chaucer: Books and Bodkins in Hamlet and The Tempest.” co-authored with Seth Lerer. Shakespeare. Journal of the British Shakespeare Association 8 (2012): 1-13.
“Shakespearean Medievalism and the Limits of Periodization in Cymbeline.” Literature Compass 8/6 (2011): 390–403.
“Rudyard Kipling and the Norman Conquest.” Ariel 39.3 (2008): 107-124.
“Rohinton Mistry’s Family Shakespeare.” in Borrowers and Lenders, the Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2 vol. 2 (Fall/Winter 2007). Award-winning peer-reviewed online journal.
“Dido Queen of England.” ELH 71 (Spring, 2006): 31-59.
“Hope Emily Allen Speaks with the Dead.” Leeds Studies in English 35 (2004): 137-160.
“Mick Jagger Macbeth.” Shakespeare Survey 57 (2004): 145-68.
“Papa Don’t Preach: The Power of Prolixity in Pericles.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 71 no. 2 (Spring, 2002): 595-622.
“Herod’s Cities: Cesaria and Sebaste in Twelfth Night.” Notes and Queries vol. 48 no. 3 (Fall, 2001): 276-8.
“Mary Tudor’s French Tutors: Renaissance Dictionaries and the Language of Love.” Dictionaries vol. 21 (2000): 37-51.
“‘Will you go, Anheers?’ The Merry Wives of Windsor, II. i. 209.” Notes and Queries vol. 46 no. 2 (Spring, 1999): 233-234.
“The Merry Wives of Windsor and the French-English Dictionary.” Le Shakespeare français: sa langue/ The French Shakespeare. His Language. ALFA: Actes de langue française et de linguistique vol. 10. (1998) : 233-243.
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
Ph.D. English Literature, Stanford UniversityM.Phil. Medieval English Literature, Oxford University
B.A. English Literature and Religious Studies, University of Toronto
Appointments
Faculty of Fine ArtsResearch Interests
All Publications
“Isabelle de France: Child Bride” The Perilous Narrow Ocean: French Connections in the Renaissance ed. Hassan Melehy and Catherine Gimelli Martin. Ashgate, 2013. pp. 27-50.
“Enter Ofelia Playing on a Lute.” The Afterlife of Ophelia. Palgrave, 2012. pp. 119-137.
“Medievalism in English Renaissance Literature.” in A Companion to Tudor Literature ed. Kent Cartwright. (Blackwell, 2010) : 213-228.
“Boethius Our Contemporary: The Consolatio in Medieval and Early Modern England.” in The Erotics of Consolation ed. Catherine Léglu and Steve Milner. Palgrave, 2008: 205-226.
“Roussillon and Retrospection in All’s Well That Ends Well. ” in Representing France in the English Renaissance ed. Jean-Christophe Meyer. University of Delaware Press, 2008: 171-192.
“Elizabeth I: Size Matters.” Goddesses and Queens: The Iconography of Elizabeth I ed. Lisa Hopkins and Annaliese Connolly. Manchester University Press, 2007: 69-80.
“Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and the Rhetoric of Temporality.” Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England ed. David Matthews and Gordon McMullan. Cambridge University Press, 2007: 31-50.
“No Man’s Elizabeth: Frances Yates and the History of History.” The Impact of Feminism on Renaissance Scholarship ed. Dympna Callaghan. Palgrave, 2007: 238-58.
“All’s Well That Ends Well and the Art of Retrograde Motion.” All’s Well That Ends Well: New Critical Essays ed. Gary Waller. Routledge, 2006: 152-170.
“Gower’s Monster.” Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures. Cambridge University Press, 2005: 127-50.
“The Dream Visions.” Yale Companion to Chaucer ed. Seth Lerer. Yale University Press, 2005: 147-78.
“Introduction: A Return to Wonder” co-authored with Ananya Kabir. Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures: 1-24.
Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches ed. Susanna Fein and David Raybin. Penn State University Press, 2009. Speculum 87 (2012): 1191-2.
Shakespeare and the Middle Ages ed. Curtis Perry and John Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Renaissance Quarterly 63:2 (Summer 2010): 701-3.
Renaissance Medievalisms. Ed. Konrad Eisenbichler. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009. Renaissance Quarterly 62:4 (Winter, 2009).
Alfred Thomas, A Blessed Shore. England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007). Renaissance Quarterly 61 (Spring, 2008): 659-660.
Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Speculum 83 (Spring, 2008): 440-441.
Richard Helgerson, Joachim du Bellay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Reformation 12 (2007): 220-222
Roland Greene, Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Sidney Journal vol. 18 no. 2. (2001) : 89-93.
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004). The National Post, October 23, 2004.
Edward Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). Sidney Journal vol. 17 no. 2 (2000): 91-2.
Georgiana Donavin, Incest Narratives and the Structure of Gower’s Confessio Amantis (English Literary Studies Monograph no. 56. Victoria, BC, 1993) Notes and Queries vol. 42 no. 3 (1995): 84.
Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood. Palgrave, 2014 (277 pp.)
The Afterlife of Ophelia. Co-editor, with Kaara Peterson. Palgrave, 2012.
The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, 2004. Paperback, 2006.
Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures. Co-editor, with Ananya Jahanara Kabir. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
“What Shakespeare Did to Chaucer: Books and Bodkins in Hamlet and The Tempest.” co-authored with Seth Lerer. Shakespeare. Journal of the British Shakespeare Association 8 (2012): 1-13.
“Shakespearean Medievalism and the Limits of Periodization in Cymbeline.” Literature Compass 8/6 (2011): 390–403.
“Rudyard Kipling and the Norman Conquest.” Ariel 39.3 (2008): 107-124.
“Rohinton Mistry’s Family Shakespeare.” in Borrowers and Lenders, the Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2 vol. 2 (Fall/Winter 2007). Award-winning peer-reviewed online journal.
“Dido Queen of England.” ELH 71 (Spring, 2006): 31-59.
“Hope Emily Allen Speaks with the Dead.” Leeds Studies in English 35 (2004): 137-160.
“Mick Jagger Macbeth.” Shakespeare Survey 57 (2004): 145-68.
“Papa Don’t Preach: The Power of Prolixity in Pericles.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 71 no. 2 (Spring, 2002): 595-622.
“Herod’s Cities: Cesaria and Sebaste in Twelfth Night.” Notes and Queries vol. 48 no. 3 (Fall, 2001): 276-8.
“Mary Tudor’s French Tutors: Renaissance Dictionaries and the Language of Love.” Dictionaries vol. 21 (2000): 37-51.
“‘Will you go, Anheers?’ The Merry Wives of Windsor, II. i. 209.” Notes and Queries vol. 46 no. 2 (Spring, 1999): 233-234.
“The Merry Wives of Windsor and the French-English Dictionary.” Le Shakespeare français: sa langue/ The French Shakespeare. His Language. ALFA: Actes de langue française et de linguistique vol. 10. (1998) : 233-243.
