University of San Diego

Faculty Member, English (Fall 2012)

Thesis Title: Performing Arguments: Debate in Early English Poetry and Drama

About

Maura Giles-Watson (PhD-English, U of Nebraska-Lincoln; MA-English, U of Massachusetts-Boston; MEd-Cross-Cultural Education, National Univ.; ALB-Classical Studies, Harvard) works on late medieval and Renaissance literature and drama, rhetoric, gender studies, digital humanities, and performance studies. Maura previously served as Deputy Commissioner of the Office of Arts and Humanities in Boston; she has also taught at both the secondary and undergraduate levels and holds secondary teaching credentials in English and Latin. Maura's dissertation, "Performing Arguments: Debate in Early English Poetry and Drama," combines Patrice Pavis' approach to performance reconstruction analysis with Wai Chi Dimock's concepts of "diachronic historicism" and "resonance" to analyze the aesthetics and ethopoeics of argumentation in a range of performance contexts from Middle English debate poetry and medieval drama through Tudor debate plays, Anglo-Latin university drama, and Shakespearean 'problem' comedy. Maura's current and longer-term projects include both a digital edition of the More Circle play Gentylnes and Nobylyte and a book-length study of the plays, playbooks, and production activities of John Heywood.

Maura's essay on disjunctivities in visual, dramatic, and literary representations of Odysseus in antiquity appeared in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 103 (2007); her work on ‘geosomatic’ women in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Middleton was included in the selected proceedings of the Newberry Library’s Mapping the Premodern graduate conference (2008); and 'The Singing Vice: Music and Mischief in Early English Drama' appeared in Early Theatre 12.2 (2009). Her teaching and research interests encompass early English literature and drama, including Shakespeare; the More Circle and the dramatic activities of Rastell and Heywood; Tudor household and public performance, repertory, and players; women performers and dramatic representations of women; varieties of presentational and representational performance; classical traditions, including Anglo-Latin literature and drama; early printing, especially of playbooks and music; music, particularly in relation to poetry and drama; and theories of performance, improvisation, rhetoric, argumentation, and digital editing.

Beginning in the fall of 2012, Maura will teach Renaissance literature and drama at the University of San Diego. At UNL Maura designed curriculum and taught Shakespeare, Linguistics, British Literature to 1800, and Rhetoric as Argument; at Nebraska Wesleyan University, British Literature to 1800; and at UMass-Boston she taught composition and co-taught both Chaucer and Five British Writers. At the secondary level she has taught English and Latin. Maura's pedagogical methods blend interdisciplinarity (esp. in drama, music, visual arts, literature, history, and rhetoric) with critical and progressive pedagogies in which students are full creative participants.

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