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Dr Lesel Dawson

Senior Lecturer

Room: 2.14

Phone: 0117 928 8869

Fax: 0117 331 7933

Email: Lesel.Dawson@bristol.ac.uk

Research Interests

My research is in the field of early modern English literature and culture (with a particular emphasis on the drama of the period). I have just completed a book on lovesickness and gender and have also published articles on John Ford, the Elizabethan succession crisis, and early modern ideas about menstruation. I am also interested in the intersection between literature and medicine. I teach on the intercalated B.A. in Medical Humanities and acted as one of the organizers of ‘Concepts of Infection’, an interdisciplinary conference that explored the ways in which infections are imagined, represented, and theorized. My current research focuses on revenge tragedy; it explores literary tropes that are common to the genre from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon to Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Writers of particular interest include: Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Middleton, and John Ford.

I am happy to supervise postgraduate work in most areas of early modern drama and culture and am particularly interested in PhD proposals that engage in some way with my own academic interests.

Books

• Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2008)

Articles

• 'Dangerous Misogyny: John Ford's The Queen and the Earl of Essex's 1601 Uprising', Explorations in the Renaissance Culture 33.1 (2007), 64-82
• 'Menstruation, Misogyny and the Cure for Love', Women's Studies, 34.6 (September, 2005): 461-484
• 'The Earl of Essex and the Trials of History: Gervase Markham's The Dumbe Knight', The Review of English Studies, New Series, 53.211 (2002): 344-364
• '  "New Sects of Love": Neoplatonism and Constructions of Gender in Davenant's The Temple of Love and The Platonick Lovers', Early Modern Literary Studies 8.1 (May, 2002): 4.1-36

Selected conference / research papers

• 'Identity in Shakespeare's Othello', lecture given for the Bridge Foundation for Psychotherapy and the Arts (February, 2007)
• 'Desire and Disgust in Early Modern Literature and Natural Philosophy', paper given at the Early Modern Research Seminar, UWE (November, 2006)
• 'Love in a Cold Climate: Reconfigurations of Neoplatonism in English Caroline Literature', paper given at the 'Mediterranean Studies Conference', Barcelona, Spain (May, 2004)
• '"Euen kings [are] priuate men": The Shifting Language of Complaint under Queen Elizabeth I and King James VI', for '1603: Historical and Cultural Consequences of the Accession of James I', University of Hull (June, 2003)
• 'Rebellious Tears: Melancholy and Opposition under Elizabeth I', for 'Exploring the Renaissance 2003', New Orleans (April, 2003)
• 'Seeing Double: Narcissism and Neoplatonism in Early Modern Literature', research seminar, University of Bristol (March, 2003)
• 'The Elizabethan Romance: Ford, the Earl of Essex, and Bibliography', for 'Early Modern Lives: Biography and Autobiography of the Renaissance and Seventeenth Century', Middlesex University, London (June, 2002)
• 'Like Father like Son: Impotence and Misogyny in John Ford's The Queen', lecture given at the Faculty Research Seminar, Galway University (February, 2002)
• '"An Artificial Way to Grieve": Suffering and Self-Fashioning in Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy', research seminar, Hertford College, Oxford (November, 2000)
• 'Beyond Ophelia: Melancholic Women in Early Modern Literature', for 'Diseases Desperate Grown: Malady and Literature', Fordham University, New York (April, 2000)

Teaching