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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 sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature and culture (with a particular emphasis on the drama of the period). My book, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature (OUP, 2008), analyzes the idea of love as a real disease in medical texts and in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It makes an important contribution to the history of romantic love, exploring the different ways that desire is believed to take root in the body, how gender roles are encoded and contested in courtship, and the psychic pains and pleasures of frustrated passion. I have also published articles on John Ford, the Elizabethan succession crisis, and early modern ideas about menstruation. I am interested in the intersection between literature and medicine and teach on the Intercalated MA in Medical Humanities.

I am currently working on a project on the revenge tragedy tradition from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon to Tarantino’s Kill Bill, focusing in particular on depictions of mothers as revenge figures. My project aims to bring to light the literary and social discrepancy in how violence in fathers and in mothers is respectively imagined, in order to investigate what it means—culturally, intellectually and socially—to be a father or a mother.

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.

I am on the Board of Directors for Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory and write a blog for the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/lesel-dawson).

Books

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

Articles

• ‘Revenge and Romance in Tarantino’s Kill Bill’ (forthcoming)
• '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 papers and community activities

• ‘Embodiment and Being in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’, Book to film day conference, Taunton Film Society (November, 2011)
• Bristol’s University of Local Knowledge Project. I participated in the ‘grandparent/carer’ discussion (June, 2011)
• ‘Love in the Renaissance’, Twilight Talk given for Bristol University’s Centre for Public Engagement (March, 2010)
• '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