Stephen Merriam Foley
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature:
Departments of English and Comparative LIterature
Phone: +1 401 863 3746
Stephen_Foley@Brown.EDU
Stephen Merriam Foley works on European renaissance culture and letters, classical traditions, lyric poetry, religion and literature, literary theory, and aesthetics.
Biography
Stephen Merriam Foley is a graduate of Brown, with an degree in Classics and English. He received the M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Yale University, where he also taught in the Department of English. He is the author of a book on the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt, co-author of Conventions and Choices, a handbook for writers, and co-editor of Sir Thomas More's Answer to a Poisoned Book, a work of religious controversy published in the Yale Edition of the Complete Works of Thomas More, and co-editor of a collection of essays on More and Erasmus in Moreana, the journal of Thomas More Studies. He has served as chair of the department of English at Brown, as the editor of Modern Language Studies, and as research editor for the Yale Edition of the Works of Thomas More, . His research includes European renaissance culture and letters, classical traditions, literary theory, and aesthetics. His article on Sir Thomas Elyot's Dictionary was awarded the Beatrice White Prize for excellence in renaissance studies by the English Association of Great Britain
Interests
Stephen Foley's most recent article, "The English Renaissance, or My Last Duchess," an essay reflecting upon the fortunes of the Burckhardtian renaissance, was published in Literary Imagination (8:1, Winter 2006). He is currently pursuing work on voice and image in lyric poetry and the visual arts and on the career of John Leland, the early Tudor humanist and Latin poet.
Degrees
Ph.D. Yale University, 1979 M.A. Yale University, 1976 B.A. Brown University, 1974
Awards
Beatrice White Prize for the Outstanding Article in English Literature before 1590, for "Coming to Terms," ELH 1994
Bronson Fellowship, 1988
Phi Beta Kappa, 1973
Affiliations
Shakespeare Association of America
Renaissance Society of America
Association of Literary Scholars and Critics
Teaching
I enjoy teaching classes on European renaissance poetry, prose, and drama, on lyric poetry from Sappho to the moderns, on literature and film, the Greek and Latin classics and European traditions, poetry and the visual arts, and literary criticism and theory. Recent titles include "Poetry, Art and Beauty," "Shakespeare and European Culture," "The Development of the Individual in Renaissance England," "Shakespeare's Present Tense," "Besides Paradise Lost: Milton's Other Poetry," "Renaissance Poetry and Modernity," "Problem of Modernity in Seventeenth Century England," "Edmund Spenser and Renaissance Poetry"
Funded Research
N/A
