Faculty
Elizabeth Weixel
Visiting Instructor
B.A. Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Minnesota
Email: eweixel-at-macalester.edu
Elizabeth Weixel studies sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and is currently a Doctoral Dissertation Fellow at the University of Minnesota, where she has taught Shakespeare, historical surveys of British literature, multicultural American literature, and professional writing. She earned a bachelor's degree in English literature and German at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, and has worked as a professional writer and editor in the Twin Cities.
Her current research interests center on forests and trees in the early modern imagination, historical English landscapes, and the role of landscape in shaping conceptions of and relations between aristocratic and common classes. An article on the decline of the aristocratic forest in Book VI of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene is currently under journal review, and she will defend her dissertation, "The Forest and Social Change in Early Modern English Literature, 1580–1700," in spring 2009. The dissertation explains the role forests played in the social hierarchy and the uses writers made of the forest in early modern England, and it approaches the poetry of landscape by integrating it with its social, historical, and legal contexts.
Areas of Study
- Early modern English literature of the Renaissance through Restoration
- Topographical poetry
- Cultural geography
- Genre studies
- Nation-building and nationalism
Fall 2008 Course
Spring 2009 Courses (descriptions forthcoming)
- Shakespeare (introductory course)
- Shakespeare: Comedies and Romances
Selected Presentations
- "Monarchical Presence and the Palace Wood of A Midsummer Night's Dream." (Northeast Modern Language Association, March 2006)
- "'No wood no Kingdome': Dissent and the Institution of the Early Modern English Forest." (North Carolina Colloquium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Feb. 2007)
- "'Soyle both fayre and frutefull': Genre and the Forest in Book VI of The Faerie Queene." eNow! English Department Research Lecture Series, University of Minnesota, (Feb. 2008)
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