Wyman H. Herendeen, Ph.D.
Professor and Department Chair
- Phone: (713) 743-2935
- Office: 205 Roy Cullen Building
Wyman H. Herendeen, Professor of English and department chair, has primary teaching and research interests in the English Renaissance, although his work extends into earlier periods, including classical literature and culture, and into later periods, such as nineteenth century art and popular culture in England and France. He has published in many areas of the English and Continental Renaissance, including an award-winning book on the relationship between literature, the physical landscape, cultural mythology, and the construction of place: From Landscape to Literature: The River and the Myth of Geography, and a study of the playwright Ben Jonson, Ben Jonson's 1616 Folio. He has also published on Petrarch and Freud, Spenser, Milton, and Ben Jonson, among others.
Dr. Herendeen has received major research grants from the Huntington Library, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Social Sciences, Humanities Research Council of Canada. Active in many scholarly organizations, he has held various executive offices in the John Donne Society, the Barnabe Riche Society, and the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies, and has been Senior Fellow at the Center for Renaissance Studies at the University of Toronto. He has held a number of administrative positions, including Chair of the English Department at the University of Houston and Department Head at the University of Windsor, in Canada.
Education
- Ph.D., University of Toronto, Renaissance English Literature
- M.A., Brown University, Renaissance English Literature
- B.A., Brown University, Modern British Literature
Research Interests
Dr. Herendeen's primary research interests include the English and Continental Renaissance and the classical tradition. His work on William Camden, the first biographer of Queen Elizabeth and a poet and historian in his own right, explores the cult of Elizabeth and Tudor and Stuart court culture. His studies of the poetry of the period explore the changing role of the poet in an emerging print culture and the experimentation in writing across genres.
Current Book Projects
William Camden: A Life in Context
(700pp., illus) 2007, Boydell & Brewer
The Politics of Grammar from Erasmus to Milton
Selected Publications
Books
- Ben Jonson's 1616 Folio: Collected Essays
Edited by W. H. Herendeen & Jennifer Brady
Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1991 - From Landscape to Literature: The River and the Myth of Geography
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987
Chapters & Articles
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“William Camden” & "Ralph Brooke"
The New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Edited by Brian Harrison
Oxford: Oxford Univ Press, 2004. -
“‘I launch at paradise and saile toward home’: The Progress of the Soule as Palinode.” In Wrestling with God: Literature and Theology in the English Renaissance; Essays to Honour Paul Grant Stanwood. Edited by Mary Ellen Henley and W. Speed Hill. Vancouver: M.E. Henley, 2001. Pp. 123–138.
Repr. EMLS special issue 7, May 2001. -
"Milton's Accedence Commenc't Grammar and the deconstruction of 'Grammatical Tyranny'." In Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World. Edited by Paul G. Stanwood. Binghamton: MRTS, 1995. Pp. 295–312.
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"The Library of Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham (British Library add. 40, 676)."
The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 85 (1991): 235–296. -
"The Etiology of Landscape: Petrarch, Freud, and the Landscape of Disease."
Annals of Scholarship: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences 7 (1990): 279–303.
Teaching Interests
- 7363: Preseminar: Renaissance Literature
- 8341: Shakespeare's Comedies and Histories
- 8342: Shakespeare's Tragedies
- 8344: Sixteenth Century Nondramatic Literature
- 8346: Seventeenth Century Nondramatic Literature
- 8347: Milton
Affiliations
- International Association of University Professors of English
- Modern Language Association
- Sixteenth Century Studies
- John Milton Society
- Shakespeare Society of America
- John Donne Society
