Assistant Professor
On faculty since 2005

Office: 310 Blanchard Hall
630-752-5052
Brett.Foster@wheaton.edu

Ph.D., Yale University, 2005
Wallace Stegner Fellow, Stanford University, 1997-1999
M.A., Boston University, 1996
B.J., University of Missouri, 1995
A.B., University of Missouri, 1995

Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Literature, Creative Writing, Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, Religion and Literature, Early Modern Travel Literature, Italian Renaissance Literature, Anglo-Italian Texts, Classical Influence in the Renaissance, Translation & Imitation, Poetics, Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Traditions of Lyric Poetry

Classical and Early British Literature [Engl 215]
Introduction to Creative Writing [Engw 313]
Writing Lyric Poetry: Imitation and Invention [Engw 333]
Shakespeare [Engl 334]
English Renaissance [Engl 336]
John Donne [Engl 348]
Modern British Literature [Engl 364]
Poetry Writing and Criticism [Engw 433]

Modern Language Association
Association of Literary Scholars and Critics
Sixteenth Century Society and Conference
Renaissance Society of America
Conference on Christianity and Literature
Shakespeare Association of America
Marlowe Society of America

Monograph entitled “The Metropolis of Popery: English Encounters with Renaissance Rome” currently under review

Poetry manuscript (previously a finalist for the National Poetry Series, Yale Series of Younger Poets, the Bakeless Prize, et al.) currently under review

Edition of three “Rome books” by the Elizabethan traveler John Nichols currently in progress

Translated volume of the collected sonnets of medieval Sienese poet (and rival of Dante’s) Cecco Angiolieri currently in progress

Articles recently completed or in progress on Renaissance London, Renaissance collections and collecting, Joachim Du Bellay’s Regrets, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the Italianate traveler William Thomas, and the theatrical uses of books in Renaissance drama   

Shakespeare Through the Ages: The Sonnets (Infobase forthcoming) [editor].

Poems and translations forthcoming in Aethlon, Anglican Theological Review, Christianity and Literature, Eleven Eleven, Green Mountains Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Journal of Italian Translation, Italian Poetry Review, Literary Imagination, and Raritan.

“The Executrix of Netflix: Queen Elizabeth I in Page, Stage, and Screen,” forthcoming in The Common Review (2008).           
 
Reviews and entries forthcoming in Modern Philology, Sixteenth Century Journal, Renaissance Quarterly, Companion to Pre-1600 British Poetry (Facts on File 2008), and Companion to Twentieth Century British Poetry (Facts on File 2008)

Shakespeare Through the Ages: Hamlet (Infobase 2008) [editor].
 
“The Goodliest Place In This World: Early Tudor Reactions to Papal Rome,” in The Sacred and Profane in English Renaissance Literature, ed. Mary A. Papazian (University of Delaware Press 2008), 27-56.

“Walking in Rome: Lyrical Disillusion and Revisitation,” Valley Voices: A Literary Review 8, no. 1 (2008): 1-5.          
 
Poems recently published in The Common Review, Rock & Sling, and Stonework.

“Sympathy for the Devil: The Lives & Afterlives of Christopher Marlowe,” The Common Review 5, no. 4 (2007): 6-16.

“The First Request of Lazarus,” reprinted in Best New Poets 2007, ed. Natasha Trethewey (Meridian 2007), 85-88.

“An Appeal to the Ghost of Patrick Kavanagh,” Southwest Review 92, no. 4 (2007): 605.
“The Little Flowers of Dan Quisenberry,” Books & Culture 13, no. 2 (2007): 43.
Review of Lisa McClain’s Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience Among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559-1642, in Journal of British Studies 46, no. 2 (2007): 444-46.
 
Review of Ros King’s Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain, Shakespeare Bulletin 25, no. 1 (2007): 156-61.
 
“Gregory Martin’s ‘Holy Latinate Jerusalem’: Roman English, Romanist Values, and the Rheims New Testament (1582),” Prose Studies 28, no. 2 (2006): 130-49.

“The First Request of Lazarus,” reprinted in American Religious Poems, ed. Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba (Library of America 2006), 593-96.

“Intercession: For My Daugther” and “The First Request of Lazarus,” Image 51 (2006): 63-66.
Rome, Literary Places series (Chelsea House 2005) [co-author]

Translation of Giovanni Pascoli’s poetry in Poems Bewitched and Haunted (Everyman 2005), 162-65.

Translation of four sonnets by Cecco Angiolieri, Yale Italian Poetry 8 (2004-05): 88-95.
“Infinite Commodities: William Thomas’s ‘Edifying’ Encounter with Renaissance Rome.” Genre 24 (2004): 10-38.

Lately I have given talks at the Marlowe Society Sixth International Conference, the Spenser International Congress, Sixteenth-Century Society and Conference, Modern Language Association, Shakespeare Association of America, Renaissance Society of America, Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and at colloquia at Yale, Princeton, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. I have also given poetry readings at Common Good Books (St. Paul), Prairie Lights Books (Iowa City), and Harold Washington Library (Chicago).