Margaret W. Ferguson

Scholar of Renaissance literature, particularly gender and writing by women; also literacy, history of education, feminist theory. Her publications, coedited scholarly texts and collections are at the center of current developments in the field. Author of two books and coeditor of eleven volumes; she is completing a third book, Missing the Maidenhead: Early Modern Cultural Debates about the Hymen. Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (2003), won the Bainton Prize from the Society for Sixteenth-Century Studies and the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Book Prize; it received honorable mention for the Renaissance Society of America's Phyllis Goodheart Gordon Book Prize. (2005) and for the American Comparative Literature Society's Rene Wellek prize (2004). Her 1983 coedited volume, Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe did much to inaugurate scholarly exploration of the place of ideas about gender in Renaissance philosophy, religion, social relations, and works of literature and art. Recipient, Guggenheim Fellowship, NEH Fellowship for Senior Scholars, ACLS Fellowship, and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Current president of the Modern Language Association of America.