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Mary Fuller
Professor  .  Office: 14N-414  .  PBX: 617-253-8848  .  Email: mcfuller@mit.edu
Associate Chair of the MIT Faculty

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Mary Fuller
Research Interests: Early modern European literature and culture; Milton; colonial North American literature and culture; travel writing and cultural encounter; history of the book

Professor Mary C. Fuller is Associate Chair of the Faculty for AY 2011-13. Her research focuses on the history of early modern voyages, exploration, and colonization; she is also interested in how observation and experience get transformed into narratives and books, and transformed again by readers past and present. She has published articles on Caribbean poetry, exploration narratives and video games, early modern circumnavigations, and Renaissance narratives of travel to Russia, West Africa, Guiana, Newfoundland, and Istanbul. Her teaching spans a broad range of topics, from poetry to scientific expeditions, including collaborations with CMS, Music, Anthropology, Women’s and Gender Studies, and EAPS. During AY 2010-11, she held an NEH Fellowship at the Huntington Library, working on a study of Richard Hakluyt’s collection of travel narratives and documents, Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1598-1600). She has studied the Japanese martial art of aikido since 1992.

Winner of the 2010 James and Ruth Levitan Prize in the Humanities

Project director of the 2011 NEH Summer Seminar "English Encounters with the Americas, 1550-1610."
http://web.mit.edu/neh/english_encounters/index.html

 

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Books

Voyages in Print:  English Travel to America, 1576-1624 (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback, 2007).
http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521481619

Remembering the Early Modern Voyage:  English Narratives in the Age of European Expansion (Palgrave, 2008).  http://us.macmillan.com/rememberingtheearlymodernvoyage

In Progress

Geographic information in the age of Drake:  a study of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1600).

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Selected Publications

Work in press

 “Arthur and Amazons:  editing the fabulous in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations” (Yearbook of English Studies). 

“’ His dark materials’: the problem of dullness in Hakluyt's collections,” in Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt, eds., Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate/ Hakluyt Society, 2011).

Work in print

“The real and the unreal in Tudor travel writing,” in Kent Cartwright, ed., Companion to Tudor Literature and Culture (Blackwells, 2009).

“Where was Iceland in 1600?,” in Jyotsna Singh, ed., Companion to the Global Renaissance (Blackwells, 2009), 149-62.

“Richard Hakluyt’s foreign relations,” in Paul Smethurst and Julia Kuehn, eds., Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility (Routledge, 2008), 38-52.

“Writing the long-distance voyage:  Hakluyt’s circumnavigators,” Huntington Library Quarterly 70 (2007), 37-60.

"Making something of it: questions of value in the early English travel collection"
Journal of Early Modern History 6 (2006), 11-38.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/jemh/2006/00000010/
F0020001/art00002;jsessionid=dl96mf34a7tk.henrietta

"The First Southerners: Jamestown's Colonists as Exemplary Figures"
In Richard Gray and Owen Robinson, eds., Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South (Blackwells, 2004), 29-42.
http://books.google.com/books?id=v10uoRwUsuEC&printsec=toc&dq=+Blackwell+Companion+to+the+
Literature+and+Culture+of+the+American+South

"Ravenous Strangers: the argument of nationalism in two narratives from Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1600)"
Studies in Travel Writing 6 (2002), 1-28.

"Images of English Origins in Newfoundland and Roanoke"
In Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny, eds.,: Canada and Europe in Multi-Disciplinary Perspective (University of Toronto, 2001), 141-158.
http://www.utppublishing.com/pubstore/merchant.ihtml?pid=7489&step=4

"English Turks and Resistant Travellers: Conversion to Islam as Homosocial Courtship"
In Jyotsna Singh and Ivo Kamps, eds., Travel Knowledge: European 'Witnesses' to "Navigations,Traffiques, and Discoveries" in the Early Modern Period (St. Martin's, 2000), 66-73.
http://www.palgrave-usa.com/Catalog/product.aspx?isbn=0312222998

"The Poetics of a Cold Climate"
Terrae Incognitae 30 (1998), 41-53.

"Myths of Identity in Derek Walcott's 'The Schooner Flight'"
Connotations 5 (1996), 322-38.

(With Henry Jenkins), "Nintendo and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue"
in Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, ed. Steve G. Jones (Sage, 1994), 57-72.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Cyberspace/FullerJenkins_Nintendo.html

"Forgetting the Aeneid"
American Literary History, (1992), 517-38.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0896-7148%28199223%294%3A3%3C517%3AFTA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A

"Ralegh's Fugitive Gold: Reference and Deferral in the Discoverie of Guiana"
Representations 33 (Winter, 1991), 42-64; reprinted in New World Encounters: Essays from Representations, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, (University of California Press, 1993), 218-40.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0734-6018%28199124%290%3A33%3C42%3ARFGRAD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H

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Classes Taught

21L.002 Foundations of Western Culture II:  The Making of the Modern World

21L.004 Reading Poetry

21L.007J World Literatures

21L013/21M013/21A013  The Supernatural in Music, Literature and Culture

21L315  Prize-winners:  Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott

21L320  Big Books:  The Faerie Queene

21L.463 Renaissance Literature

21L.703 Studies in Drama

21L704  Studies in Poetry:  Virgil, Spenser and Milton;
21L704  Studies in Poetry:  Gender and Lyric in the Renaissance

21L705  Major Authors:  Rewriting Genesis:  Milton’s Paradise Lost and Twentieth-Century Fantasy

21L707  Problems in Cultural Interpretation:  Race, Religion and Identity in Early American Writing

21LA Freshman Advising Seminar:  Catastrophe, Tedium, Discovery:  When Expeditions Do Science

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