College of Arts and Sciences

Department of English

William Hamlin
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies

Will Hamlin

(Photo: John Snyder)

Will Hamlin teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in Shakespeare, Spenser, Renaissance drama, and early modern literature more generally. Educated at Carleton College (B.A., Philosophy) and the University of Washington (Ph.D., English), his research interests include Renaissance tragedy and tragic theory, the reception of classical and continental writers in early modern England, the history of philosophy and religion, and the French essayist Montaigne. Hamlin has also written plays and non-academic essays.

His articles and reviews have appeared in English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Quarterly, Montaigne Studies, SEL, Journal of the History of Ideas, Early Modern Literary Studies, Comparative Drama, Shakespeare Studies, and other journals, and he has been the recipient of research fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as grants from the British Academy and the Renaissance Society of America.

Hamlin's first book, The Image of America in Montaigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare (St. Martin's Press, 1995), examines the interplay of Renaissance ethnographic writings and mainstream literary production. He has recently finished a second book, Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare's England. Canvassing the reception and literary appropriation of classical scepticism in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, this study concentrates on a dozen plays by Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Webster, Cary, Middleton, and Ford.

 

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