Degrees: BA Hons, MA (Western Ontario), PhD (Toronto)

President's Scholar

Jeanne Shami's main fields of interest include John Donne, especially his sermons and reception history; historical approaches to Renaissance literature; censorship and Renaissance literature; and women as writers and patrons of literature and sermons in the 17th century. She has published numerous essays and book chapters on John Donne, and has been invited to deliver three plenary addresses on her work on Donne to international conferences in Britain and the United States. A parallel-text edition of the Donne sermon corrected in his hand (the only such Donne sermon known to scholars) was published in 1996. She has also edited a special issue of the John Donne Journal on sermons and contributed the historical and critical introduction to reading the sermons of this period. Currently, she is an editorial board member of the John Donne Journal and English Studies in Canada, and serves on the General Editorial Board of the Donne Variorum project. She completed a term as President of the John Donne Society in 2003, and was asked to prepare the program and festivities for the 20th annual conference in 2005 and the forthcoming 25th anniversary conference in 2010. She was named President's Scholar (2003-2005), and in 2004 received the Alumni Award for Excellence in Research. Work on two further manuscript discoveries appeared in English Manuscript Studies (2007). Her book, John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit (326 pages), was published by D. S. Brewer in 2003 and won the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication for that year (she also received this award in 1996 and 2000). A book entitled Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England (Duquesne UP, 2008) has recently been published. This book was edited by Professor Shami and contains twelve essays, including her essay on Donne's use of circumcision and transubstantiation as tropes. An essay on "Donne and the Bible" is forthcoming in Blackwell's Companion to Literature and the Bible. Her ongoing research projects include The Oxford Handbook of John Donne (which she is currently editing with Tom Hester and Dennis Flynn); advisory board member and contributor to The Letters of John Donne (forthcoming, Oxford UP); advisory consultant to The Sermons of John Donne (forthcoming from Oxford UP, ed. Peter McCullough); contributor to the Donne Variorum project (to the Satyres and Verse Letters volumes); and a study of Women and Sermons 1500-1700.