Judith Owens

• ENGL 2070 - Literature of the Sixteenth Century
• ENGL 2980 - Poetry: Early Modern Sonnets, Satires, Epyllia
• ENGL 3180 - "The Faerie Queene"
• ENGL 4630/7940 - Elizabethan Plague Literature

I have been a professor of Renaissance English literature at the University since 2002. 

• PhD (English Literature), University of Manitoba

Research interests

• English literature of the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, especially Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare
• Early modern healing arts, including household medicine
• Early modern pedagogical culture
• Early modern ghosts

Research summary

My current research in early modern household medicine and care-giving asks two overarching questions: 

1. What is the role of affective labour in the healing arts of the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries? 
2. In what ways and to what extent do the affordances of healing spaces--physical, social, and rhetorical--shape healing practices? 

My longer-term objective in undertaking this archival research will be to integrate the insights gained from it into my study of early modern literature, my primary academic discipline. In particular, I will apply this research to the works of Edmund Spenser, whose poetry is filled with scenes of healing. My aim is to complete a monograph on the ethics of care in Spenser. 

Monographs

• 2020 Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture: Hamlet, The Faerie Queene, and Arcadia. (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020).*Reviews: Spenser Review 51.1.9 (Winter 2021); Renaissance Quarterly 76.2 (Summer 2023). 
• 2002 Enabling Engagements: Edmund Spenser and the Poetics of Patronage. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2002.

Journal Articles (Refereed unless otherwise noted)

• 2007 “Memory Works in The Faerie Queene.” Spenser Studies Volume XXII. 27-45.
• 2007 “Commerce and Cadiz in Spenser’s Prothalamion.” SEL 47.1 (Winter): 79-106.
• 2005 “Commercial Settings of the 1590 Faerie Queene.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 38.2 (Fall): 149-71. Invited and refereed submission.
• 2003 “Professing Ireland in the Woods of Spenser’s Mutabilitie. Explorations in Renaissance Culture 29.1 (Summer): 1-25.
• 2000 “The Poetics of Accommodation in Spenser’s Epithalamion.” SEL 40.1 (Winter): 41-62.

Chapters

• 2015 “Warding off Injustice in Book Five of The Faerie Queene.” Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern Literature. Eds. Don Beecher, et al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 204-24.
• 2013 “Patrilineal Ralegh.” Literary and Visual Ralegh. Ed. Christopher Armitage. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press. 302-26.

• 2020 - Merit Award, Research and Scholarship, University of Manitoba