Research Interests: Early modern European literature and culture; Milton; colonial North American literature and culture; travel writing and cultural encounter; history of the book
Mary C. Fuller (Associate Professor) works on the history of early modern voyages, exploration, and colonization. Her teaching interests range from the great works of Renaissance poetry (Paradise Lost, the Faerie Queene) to the intellectual and practical aftermaths of Europe's encounter with America in the 15th century and beyond. She is also interested in material books and how readers use them, in the past and in the 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, as well as Voyages in Print: English Travel to America: 1576-1624. Trips organized by MIT's Alumni Travel Program have gotten her to some of the places early travelers went as a guest lecturer. She has also been studying the Japanese martial art of aikido since 1992, and currently teaches classes both at New England Aikikai (Cambridge) and Portsmouth Aikikai (NH).
"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
21L.002 Foundations of Western Culture, Renaissance to Modernity
21L.004 Reading Poetry
21L.007J World Literatures
21L.009 Shakespeare
21L.460 Medieval Literature
21L.463 Renaissance Literature
21L.703 Studies in Drama
21L.704 Studies in Poetry
21L.705 Major Authors
21L.707 Problems in Cultural Interpretation
21L.708 Technologies of Humanism
