Bookmark and Share

Maura Giles-Watson, PhD

Assistant Professor

Maura Giles-Watson teaches early English literature and drama and specializes in the Renaissance. She has taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Massachusetts-Boston; she also taught at the secondary level and holds teaching credentials in English and Latin. Maura plays the cello and previously served as Deputy Commissioner of the Office of Arts and Humanities in Boston.

Education

PhD (English—Medieval and Renaissance Literature and Drama), University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2012 MEd (Cross-Cultural Education), National University, 2005 MA (English—Medieval and Renaissance Literature and Drama, and Rhetoric and Composition) University of Massachusetts-Boston, 2002 ALB (Classical Studies) Harvard, 1996

Scholarly and Creative Work

Current projects: Performing Arguments: Debate in Early English Poetry and Drama (dissertation under revision). The Last Minstrel: John Heywood and the Transformation of Performance in Sixteenth-Century England (monograph in progress). “Reconstructing the Repertory for John Rastell’s 1520s Public Stage.” Forthcoming in Early Theatre 16.2 (2013). “Anxiety and Epistolarity: Lovers’ Letters in Boccaccio’s Filostrato, Chaucer’s Troilus, and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.” Forthcoming 2013. “Music, Musicians, and Musical Parts on Henrician Stages.” Forthcoming 2014. “Playing as Literate Practice: Humanism the Exclusion of Women Players from London’s Professional Stages.” Forthcoming 2014. Publications “The Singing ‘Vice’: Music and Mischief in Early English Drama.” Early Theatre 12.2 (2009), 57-90. “Female Body as Geosomatic Apotrope in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Middleton.” Selected Papers from the Mapping the Premodern Conference. Chicago: Newberry Library, Center for Renaissance Studies, 2008. “Odysseus and the Ram in Art and (Con)text: Arthur M. Sackler Museum 1994.8 and the Hero\'s Escape from Polyphemos.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 103 (2007), 555-77. “Backtalk: Kudos for Kozol.” Phi Delta Kappan 87.7 (2006), 559.

Teaching Interests

Maura’s teaching interests encompass medieval and Renaissance English literature and drama, including Shakespeare; Thomas More and his intellectual circle; Tudor performance practices, repertory, and players; women performers and dramatic representations of women; Renaissance uses of the classical tradition; the history of the book, especially early printing of music and playbooks; music, particularly in relation to poetry and drama in performance; linguistics and the history of English; historical approaches to literature and drama, including Catholic studies, gender studies, and ethnic studies perspectives; theories of performance, improvisation, and rhetoric; and the practice of progressive pedagogies.