photograph by Patrick Hinely

Genelle Gertz
Assistant Professor of English

Department of English
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, VA 24450
(540) 458-8763
Payne Hall 23
email: gertzg@wlu.edu

Education

Ph.D., English, Princeton University, 2003
M.A., English, Princeton University, 1998                       
M.A., English, University of Pittsburgh, 1996
B.A., English & Philosophy, magna cum laude, Wheaton College, 1994

Research Interests

Medieval and early modern women writers; the Reformation; republicanism and the English revolution; prophecy, mysticism and heresy trials; the politics of reading. Professor Gertz's summer research is supported by a short-term fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

English 105—Faith and Doubt
English 250—British Literature: Medieval and Renaissance
English 252—Shakespeare
English 316—Renaissance Literature: the 16th Century
English 326—Seventeenth-Century Poetry
English 330—Milton
Medieval and Renaissance Studies 110—Romance and Mysticism

Seminar and Capstone Topics

Trials, Torture, and the Truth
The Damned: Hell from Virgil to Milton
My Life: Personal Writing in Early Modern England

Selected Publications

"Stepping into the Pulpit? Women's Preaching in The Book of Margery Kempe and The Examinations of Anne Askew" in  Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2005), 459-82.

"Still Martyred After All These Years: Generational Suffering in Milton's Areopagitica." English Literary History 70.4 (2004).

"Anne Askew," "Anna Julia Cooper," "Eleanor Davies," "Esther Sowernam," and "Ida B. Wells." Entries in The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English. ed. Lorna Sage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999: 23, 151, 171, 591, 658.

Work in Progress

Book Project: Trying Testimony: Heresy, Interrogation and the English Woman Writer, 1400-1670

Archival Research: "The Rhetoric of Interrogation."

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