EDUCATION

•Ph.D., English and American Literature and Language, Harvard University, March 2005 

•A.M., English and American Literature and Language, Harvard University, 2000

•A.B., magna cum laude, English Literature, Smith College, 1997 (Phi Beta Kappa)

Wendy Hyman joined the Ithaca College English Department in the fall of 2004 as Assistant Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature; she also teaches in the IC Honors program. Her scholarly and teaching interests include 16th- and 17th-century English literature, the history of science (early modern through the Enlightenment), automata and cyborgs, Renaissance Ovidianism and mythology, lyric poetry, the history of printing and the book, and philosophy in literature.

With Professor Dan Breen, she is co-organizer of the Ithaca College Medieval and Renaissance Studies Colloquium, an interdisciplinary faculty seminar that meets once a month to discuss and present research on the history, literature, and culture of the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. She served for 2 years as the faculty sponsor of Sigma Tau Delta (the English Honors Society) and currently serves on the Honors Steering Committee. She was the Oracle Society Faculty Inductee in 2007.

CURRENT AND UPCOMING COURSES (see syllabi in "Documents" folder):

• The Poetry of Love and Seduction in the English Renaissance
• The Supernatural in Shakespeare
• Literary Automata
• Shakespearean Tragedy
• Hamlet (2 week intensive)
• Renaissance Literature Survey
• The History of the Printed Book
• Shakespeare: England and Rome
• What is Beauty? (Honors Seminar)
• Shakespeare's Problem Comedies and Romances
• Seminar on the Poetry and Prose of John Donne
• Under development: Science and Literature in the Renaissance, Shakespeare and Ovid, Renaissance Drama, Literary Utopias

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS:

Professor Hyman is currently revising a book manuscript entitled Skeptical Seductions: Carpe Diem Poetry and the Eroticism of Doubt. Combining the history of science and philosophy with the literature of the Renaissance, the book looks at erotic carpe diem poems as a site of clashing epistemologies.  She argues that the nature of time, materiality, and virginity are all interrogated by these seemingly trivial poems.  Examining the breadth of the carpe diem topos in a variety of genres, Skeptical Seductions finds that philosophical materialism and skepticism are perhaps the most erotic of discourses in Renaissance literature, while the more conventional discourses they challenge are voiced by and equated with the resistant virgins of the seduction poems themselves.

In addition to this monograph, Wendy has several other projects underway. She is the editor of The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature, an anthology of new essays on literary representations of vivified objects (moving statues, talking brass heads, etc.) in early modern prose, poetry, and drama. The completed book manuscript is under contract with Ashgate Press' Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity series.  In addition to editing and introducing the volume, Wendy has contributed to the volume a chapter called “‘Mathematical experiments of long silver pipes’: The Renaissance Trope of the Mechanical Bird,” which examines what it means when an early modern poet longs not for an organic, but a mechanical voice.

She is also working on an essay on incest, mimesis, and the Freudian "uncanny," that begins with Ovidian myths of Pygmalion and Myrrha and works through several early modern texts, including Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Greene's Pandosto, and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. 

She is at work on a survey essay, "Early Modern Literature and the History of Science," solicited for Literature Compass. 

Finally, she is in the early research stages of a project on the concept of “nothing” in the Renaissance.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

“What sin you do to save a brother’s life”: Propositioning the Virgin in Measure for Measure (under consideration)

“‘Mathematical experiments of long silver pipes’: The Renaissance Trope of the Mechanical Bird” (forthcoming)

“Seizing Flowers in Spenser’s Garden and Bower,” ELR (English Literary Renaissance) 37.2 (May 2007): 193-214

“The Unfortunate Traveller and Authorial Self-Consciousness,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 45.1 (Winter 2005): 23-41

RECENT PRESENTATIONS:

“Shakespeare and Technology,” Shakespeare Association of America, March 2008

“Mathematical experiments of long silver pipes: The Renaissance Trope of the Mechanical Bird,” Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, November 2007

“Marlowe’s Hero and Leander: Seducing Venus’ ‘None,’” Renaissance Society of America invited panelist, March 2007

“Epicurus in the Garden: Spenser’s Confrontation with Philosophical Materialism,” Shakespeare Association of America, April 2006