This page shows the staff for the University of Nottingham's School of English in the UK. Please see here for the School of Education and English in China and the School of English in Malaysia.
Alison Bumke
Assistant Professor in Seventeenth-Century Literature and Drama, Faculty of Arts
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Biography
I completed my MPhil (2011) and PhD (2015) in English at Queens' College, Cambridge, after receiving my BA (2010) in English from Barnard College, Columbia University. I served as an Official Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Queens' in 2015-16; after that, I was a Fellow Commoner (Research) at Queens'. I also taught English Literature and Language at the Université Paris-Diderot in 2014-15.
Teaching Summary
I teach Renaissance literature to undergraduates and postgraduates. I convene the third-year undergraduate course Reformation and Revolution, and contribute teaching to Drama, Theatre, and… read more
Research Summary
My doctoral dissertation is the basis of my current book project, Eloquent Blood: John Donne's Language of Disease. This study explores how early modern medical culture shaped the form of Donne's… read more
Recent Publications
I teach Renaissance literature to undergraduates and postgraduates. I convene the third-year undergraduate course Reformation and Revolution, and contribute teaching to Drama, Theatre, and Performance; Shakespeare and his Contemporaries on the Page and Stage; Shakespeare's Histories; Shakespeare, Space, and Place; Early Performance Cultures; Speculative Fictions; and Twentieth Century Poetry and Politics. I also supervise undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations.
Current Research
My doctoral dissertation is the basis of my current book project, Eloquent Blood: John Donne's Language of Disease. This study explores how early modern medical culture shaped the form of Donne's writing as much as its content. He mirrored the experience of illness - with its jarring transformations and harrowing uncertainties - in the paradoxes and contradictions for which his work is famous. My doctoral research informed two articles: 'More Than Skin Deep: Dissecting Donne's Imagery of Humours' in The Review of English Studies (September 2015) and 'Cures and Currency in John Donne's Verse Letters to Patrons' in Studies in English Literature (February 2017).
Future Research
My new book project, Contemplating Melancholy: Women's Writing of the English Civil War, explores how and why women writing in seventeenth-century England featured melancholy in their work. My work will show how these writers embraced their war-inflicted isolation, displacement, and loss as a source of inspiration and developed an artistic identity distinct from that of their male peers. Yale's Beinecke Library has awarded me the Edith and Richard French Fellowship to underwrite research for the book during a semester-long residency in Spring 2020.