Deanne Williams

B.A. (University of Toronto); M.Phil. (Oxford); Ph.D. (Stanford)

Deanne Williams is the author of The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2004), which won the Roland H. Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society in 2005, and co-editor, with Ananya Jahanara Kabir of the University of Leeds, of Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge, 2005). Specializing in Medieval and Renaissance literature, especially Shakespeare, she has published articles on a variety of topics, including Queen Elizabeth I, Marlowe, Chaucer, John Gower, and early modern dictionaries, as well as Shakespeare. She has a special interest in the work of pioneering female scholars such as Hope Emily Allen and Dame Frances Yates, and in the adaptation of Shakespeare by contemporary novelists and filmmakers such as Rohinton Mistry and Roman Polanski. She is also a contributor to the forthcoming Greenwood Shakespeare Encyclopedia, edited by Patricia Parker. Current research includes a study of early modern girlhood, entitled Girls Own Shakespeare, and a SSHRC-funded project called Shakespearean Medievalism.

She has received fellowships from Trinity College, Cambridge, Clare Hall, Cambridge, the Huntington Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. In 2003 she won the John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature.

Contact Information:
Office:  348A Stong College
Telephone:  416-736-2100 ext. 44752
E-mail: dmw@yorku.ca