Associate Professor
PhD, Berkeley
MA, Toronto
BA, Alberta
Extension: 32124
Office: HH 246
Email: k2graham@uwaterloo.ca
Biography
I joined the Waterloo faculty in 2001, having taught previously at New Mexico State University, Dalhousie University, the University of Alberta, the University of Wyoming, and the University of California at Berkeley. I have taught two dozen different undergraduate and graduate courses, but most often teach Shakespeare and English Renaissance poetry. My research focuses on the relationship between literature and history, particularly the histories of religion, politics, and education. My first book,The Performance of Conviction, explored how rejecting the need for rhetorical artifice paradoxically became the rhetorical and literary means by which an early modern culture of conviction sought variously to reform, educate, serve, dominate, or abandon the world. In 2005 I co-organized the 17th Waterloo Conference on Elizabethan Theatre on the topic of Religion and Theatre, which led to the publication in 2009 of Shakespeare and Religious Change. Since 2006 I have chaired uWaterloo's Newberry-Folger committee, which administers our institutional membership in the Center for Renaissance Studies Consortium of Chicago's Newberry Library, and which maintains our connection to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
Selected publications
"Plain Style" and "Devotional Poetry." Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Fourth ed. (Princeton UP, 2012).
"Fulke Greville." Blackwell Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, ed. Garrett Sullivan and Alan Stewart (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
"Soyinka and the Dead Dramatist," Comparative Drama 44 (2010), 29-44.
Herbert's Holy Practice, in George Herbert's Pastoral: New Essays on the Poet and Priest of Bemerton, ed. Christopher Hodgkins (University of Delaware Press, 2010), 72-90.
Shakespeare and Religious Change, ed. with Philip D. Collington (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
"'Clear as heaven': Herbert's Poetry and Rhetorical Divinitie," Renaissance and Reformation 29:2-3 (2005), 183-201.
"Distributive Measures: Theology and Economics in the Writings of Robert Crowley,” Criticism 47 (2005), 137-158.
"George Herbert and the 'Discipline’ of History,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001), 349-377.
The Performance of Conviction: Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance (Cornell University Press, 1994). Rhetoric and Society Series.
"'Without the form of justice’: Plainness and the Performance of Love in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991), 438-461.
Fellowships & awards
- National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
- Huntington Library Fellowship
- Kaplan Postdoctoral Fellowship
Current research
I am completing a book investigating the relationship between English poetry and post-Reformation church discipline. Discipline is a point of contact between education and government - both a form of social cement and a deep psychological structure - so the Reformation attack on the disciplinary structures of the late medieval church carried far-ranging implications for both literary authority and the literary production of the self. I am exploring these implications in English poetry from the sixteenth-century metrical psalms to Milton and in modern theory from Max Weber to Michel Foucault.
Areas of graduate supervision
- Renaissance and Reformation Literature, including Shakespeare and Milton
- Poetry
- Literature and rhetoric