Assistant Professor
On faculty since 2005

Office: 310 Blanchard Hall
630-752-5052
Brett.Foster@wheaton.edu

Ph.D., Yale University, 2005
Wallace Stegner Fellow, Stanford University, 1997-1999
M.A., Boston University, 1996
B.J., University of Missouri, 1995
A.B., University of Missouri, 1995

Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Literature, Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, Early Modern Travel Writing, Italian Renaissance Literature, Anglo-Italian Texts, Classical Influence in the Renaissance, Reformation and Counter-Reformation Discourses, Early English Devotional Writing, Renaissance Bibles, Theology & Literature

Creative Writing, Literary Translation, Traditions of Lyric Poetry, Critical Theory and Poetics, Twentieth-Century British Literature, Contemporary Poetry

Classical and Early British Literature [Engl 215]
Introduction to Creative Writing [Engw 313]
Writing Lyric Poetry: Imitation and Invention [Engw 333]
English Renaissance [Engl 336]

Modern Language Association
Association of Literary Scholars and Critics
Renaissance Society of America
Sixteenth Century Society and Conference
Conference on Christianity and Literature
Marlowe Society of America

Revising doctoral dissertation for publication: “The Metropolis of Popery: Writing of Rome in the English Renaissance” (2005)

Completing poetry manuscript (earlier version a finalist for the National Poetry Series, Yale Series of Younger Poets, and the Bakeless Prize)

Writing essays on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Joachim Du Bellay’s Regrets, the Elizabethan apostate John Nichols, and the life and work of Christopher Marlowe

Translating Medieval and Renaissance poems by Cecco Angiolieri and Pius II

Editing an introductory anthology of English Renaissance poetry

Finishing book reviews for Modern Philology, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Journal of British Studies

Co-editing (with Harold Bloom and others) a Shakespeare Through the Ages multi-volume series (Facts on File)

“Gregory Martin’s ‘Holy Latinate Jerusalem’: Roman English, Romanist Values, and the Rheims New Testament (1582).” (forthcoming in Prose Studies)

“The Goodliest Thing In This World: Early Tudor Reactions to Papal Rome.” In Negotiating the Sacred and Profane in Early Modern Literature (forthcoming)

Rome, Literary Places series (Chelsea House 2005) [co-author]

Translation of Giovanni Pascoli’s poetry in Poems Bewitched and Haunted (Everyman 2005), 162-65.

“Infinite Commodities: William Thomas’s ‘Edifying’ Encounter with Renaissance Rome.” Genre 24 (2004): 10-38.

“A Biography of James Joyce.” In James Joyce (Chelsea House 2003)

Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in Agni, Beacon Street Review, Black Warrior Review, Boston Book Review, Bostonia, Boston Review, The Christian Century, Christian Scholar’s Review, Columbia, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Image, Mars Hill Review, The Missouri Review, Partisan Review, PN Review (UK), Poetry International, Radix, Saint Ann’s Review, Santa Clara Review, and the anthologies And What Rough Beast: Poems at the End of the Century (Ashland) and American Religious Poetry (Library of America) 

Lately I have given talks at conferences of the Renaissance Society of America, Spenser International Congress, Sixteenth-Century Society and Conference, Modern Language Association, Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and at colloquia at Yale, Princeton, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.