William Sherman
CONTACT
- Tel 44 1904 433340
- Email ws505@york.ac.uk
- Fax 44 1904 433372
William Sherman is Professor of Renaissance/Early Modern Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Renaissance & Early Modern Studies. He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota (USA), and received his BA from Columbia and MPhil and PhD from Cambridge. He taught at the University of Maryland and Queen Mary (University of London) before moving to York in 2005. In 2008, he was the Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor at Caltech and The Huntington Library.
INTERESTS
Professor Sherman's research and teaching interests include:- Renaissance literature and culture
- the intersections between literature, learning and politics
- exploration and travel writing
- science and magic
- sleep in literature, music and art
- adaptations of Shakespeare
- Textual studies
- the relationship between speech, manuscript, print and screen
- the theory and practice of editing
- the history of libraries and archives
- marginalia and reading practices
- Contemporary art
- artists' books
- sound-art
- The literature of espionage and terrorism
He would welcome applications from students wishing to work on these topics.
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
Professor Sherman is Associate Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly and a member of editorial and advisory boards for journals, centres, and editorial projects on both sides of the Atlantic. He currently serves on the Councils of the Hakluyt Society, the Society for Renaissance Studies, and the Renaissance Society of America, and is a Trustee of the Laurence Sterne Trust. He regularly reads manuscripts for publishers and acts as assessor for fellowships and scholarships, as well as for academic positions in other universities. He is external examiner for MAs at Queen Mary and King’s College London, and he is a member of the Peer Review College for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). He has delivered named lectures at The Newberry and Huntington Libraries and has delivered plenary addresses to a number of international conferences. In 2007 he was made a fellow of the English Association.SELECTED BOOKS, EDITIONS AND ARTICLES
Prison Writings in Early Modern Britain, edited with William J. Sheils as a special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly (Summer 2009)
"Patents and Prisons: Simon Sturtevant and the Fate of the Renaissance Inventor," in Sherman and Sheils (eds.), Prison Writings in Early Modern Britain
"The Beginning of 'The End'," in Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (eds.), Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
"Shakespearean Somniloquy: Sleepy Language in The Tempest," in Tom and Margaret Healy (eds.), Renaissance Transformations: The Making of English Writing, 1500-1650 (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming)
"The Social Life of Books," in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
Ben Jonson's The Alchemist (with Peter Holland), in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press)
"Digging the Dust: Renaissance Archivology," in Leonard Barkan, Bradin Cormack, and Sean Keilen (eds.), Forms of Renaissance Thought: New Essays on Literature and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
The Complete Shakespeare, a special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly (Fall 2007)
Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)
"On the Threshold: Architecture, Paratext, and Early Print Culture," in Sabrina A. Baron, Eric Lindquist, and Eleanor Shevlin (eds.), Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies and the Legacy of Eisenstein (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007)
"The Marginal History of the Manicule," in Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (eds.), Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading (London and New Castle, Delaware: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2005)
On Shakespeare, co-edited with Peter Holland as issue 10.3 of Performance Research (September 2005)
William Shakespeare's The Tempest (with Peter Hulme), a Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 2004)
"Bringing the World to England: The Politics of Translation in the Age of Hakluyt," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14 (2004), 199-207
"Distant Relations: Letters from America, 1492-1677," in a special issue on "Cultural Studies in the History of Letter-Writing," Huntington Library Quarterly 66:3-4 (Winter 2003), 225-45
"'Rather soiled by use': Attitudes Towards Readers' Marks," The Book Collector 52:4 (Winter 2003), 471-90
"Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library," 12 reels of microfilm with users' guide (Marlborough: Adam Matthew Publications, 2002)
On Editing, co-edited with Claire MacDonald as issue 7.1 of Performance Research (March 2002)
"Stirrings and Searchings (1500-1720)," in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 17-36
"Travel and Trade," in Arthur Kinney (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 109-20
"What Did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Books?" in Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 119-37
'The Tempest' and its Travels, co-edited with Peter Hulme (London: Reaktion Books, and Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000)
"'The Book thus put in every vulgar hand': Marking Readers in Early English Printed Bibles," in Paul Saenger and Kimberly Molanari (eds.), The Bible as Book: The First Printed Editions (London: The British Library, 1999), 125-33
"Anatomizing the Commonwealth: Language, Politics, and the Elizabethan Social Order," in Elizabeth Fowler and Roland Greene (eds.), The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 104-21
John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995; paperback, 1997)
WORK-IN-PROGRESS
Renaissance Libraries (Yale UP)An edition of Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta for the Arden Early Modern Drama series
An artist’s book on manicules
A collaborative study of Archbishops' libraries
A collection of essays on the cultures of cutting and pasting in the Renaissance