Genevieve Guenther

Assistant Professor of English

PhD  University of California, Berkeley

Research interests

Genevieve Guenther has research interests in early modern English and in literary and cultural theory. She is particularly interested in studying the historical contexts for what has been retrospectively characterized as aesthetic experience. She is presently completing a book about the relationship between magical practice and what she calls Renaissance instrumental aesthetics in Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare, and Milton. Guenther also has interests in the study of gender and sexuality, and she is currently beginning a project on the early modern English concept of "erotic idolatry."
 
 
Selected publications

• Spenser's Magic, or Instrumental Aesthetics in the 1590 Faerie Queene, English Literary Renaissance 36.2 (April 2006): 194-226
  
  
• Review Essay: "New Historical Elizabeths," Huntington Library Quarterly 70.3 (2007).
  
  
• "Wallace Stevens' Marvellian Intertext: 'The Garden' and 'Description without Place,'" The Wallace Stevens Journal 31.1 (Spring 2007):14-26.
  

• The Renaissance Education of Love
  
• Growing Up in Shakespeare's Plays
  
• Renaissance Magic: Practice and Poetic
  
• Twentieth-Century Literary Theory
  
• Metaphysical Poetry
• Genealogies of Tragedy

• Francis Bacon Foundation, The Huntington Library, 2006 - 2007
  
• Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund, 2003-04
  
• Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley, 2002-03
  
• Mellon Foundation, 2000-01

Selected Talks, Papers, and Professional Activities

• "Erotic Idolatry in The Winter's Tale," SAA, San Diego, CA, April 2007.
• Invited Talk, "Writing Poetry, Conjuring Demons," The Huntington Library, July 2006
  
• "Spenser's Strange Genius: the Mind in the Garden of Adonis and the Bower of Bliss," International Spenser Society Conference, University of Toronto, May 2006
  
• "The Permanence of Literary Autonomy and the Ephemera of Disinterest," MLA, Washington DC, December 2005
  
• Invited Paper, "Interest and Instrumentality in Early Modern Literary Aesthetics," (Im)permanence: Cultures in/out of Time, Carnegie Mellon University, October 2005
• Organizer and Chair, "Renaissance Performativities," Renaissance Society of America, New York NY, April 2004
• Invited Paper, "Aesthetics before Kant, or the Interdisciplinarity of
  Renaissance Criticism," Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley, April 2003