Grant Williams

Research Interests

• Early Modern Rhetoric, Literature, and Psychology/Cognition
• The Memory Arts and Book History
• Fantasy, Imagination, and Interiority
• The Death Arts and Commemoration

Current Research

Because we live in an age where books are disposable and remembering is left to computers, the commemoration of the dead seems as short-lived as an obituary and, if the activity lasts any longer, confines itself to a private, solitary remembrance. Face it, commemoration does not tell us what we want to hear in our youth-obsessed society: we age and pass away in the blink of an eye, and collectively we have a duty toward the dead, whose after-images still live among us. Premodern English culture and its literature, however, show us that we once thought quite differently about commemoration. Books were driven by a memorialization and monumentalization, arising from the period’s profound religious orientation, whether Catholic or Protestant, and its valorization of status and fame, especially among the upper and aspirant classes. The dead were to be actively remembered because people not only believed in an afterlife but also privileged the lasting consequences of an individual’s pedigree, character, and achievements.

My research examines the connections between death and memory in print culture from 1500-1700. The main frame of reference through which I study this connection is the premodern concept of art and artifice. At this time, the term “art”—as opposed to nature—referred to the exercises, skills, and crafts, both theoretical and practical, that establish habits, teach rituals, and fashion artifacts. Both memory and death then were constructed by larger cultural programs, stimulating a range of questions for research. How did the memory and death arts shape Renaissance English print products? What were the material—especially the rhetorical—means by which books and their genres ritualized mortality and remembered the dead? For instance, title pages and dedicatory epistles in the period employed various techniques with which they memorialized their patrons and authors. Finally, how did these artifacts and practices shaping bookish culture foster different kinds of cognition distinctive to premodernity? For example, the mental discipline surrounding the ubiquitous injunction memento mori (“remember that you must die”) trained people’s minds to imaginatively transport themselves to their future day of dying in order to shape their present-day thoughts. My research, coming as it does at the intersection between memory and death, examines the ambitions and failures of commemoration. My current short-term project examines the place of the imagination within the art of memory, and my latest long-term project brings out the context of commemoration and monumentalization in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Recent Books

Henry Chettle, Kind-Heart’s Dream and Piers Plainness: Two Pamphlets from the Elizabethan Book Trade. Coedited with Donald Beecher. Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2022.

The Death Arts in Renaissance England: A Critical Anthology. Coedited with William E. Engel and Rory Loughnane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

The Shakespearean Death Arts: Hamlet among the Tombs. Coedited with William E. Engel. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England. Coedited with William E. Engel and Rory Loughnane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Recent Chapters

“Monumental Memory and Little Reminders: the Fantasy of Being Remembered by Posterity.” The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory. Ed. by Andrew Hiscock and Lina Perkins Wilder. New York: Routledge, 2018. 297-311.

“Introduction.” Cowritten with William E. Engel. The Shakespearean Death Arts: Hamlet among the Tombs. Ed. by William E. Engel and Grant Williams. Palgrave Shakespeare Series. Palgrave Macmillan: 2022.

“The Exemplum, Posterity, and Dramatic Irony in Antony and Cleopatra.” In The Shakespearean Death Arts: Hamlet among the Tombs. Ed. by William E. Engel and Grant Williams. Palgrave Shakespeare Series. Palgrave Macmillan: 2022.

“Introduction: Between Memory and Death.” Cowritten with William E. Engel and Rory Loughnane. Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England. Ed. by William E. Engel, Rory Loughnane, and Grant Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

“The Lustful Oblivion of Widowhood in The Insatiate Countess.” In Memory and Affect in Shakespeare’s England. Ed by Jonathan Baldo and Isabel Karremann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming (August 2023).

Recent Presentations

“Memorable Designs: The Memory Arts and the Rhetoric of the Sermon.” Emblems I: Emblematic Resolutions. Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society. Renaissance Society of America Conference. New Orleans LA. 22 March, 2018.

“Feeding the Fancy: Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems and the Management of Mental Imagery.” Emblems II: Emblems and Cognition in Early Modern England. Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society. Renaissance Society of America Conference. Toronto ON. 18 March, 2019.

Recent Blog Posts

“The Arts of Dancing with Death.” Cowritten with William E. Engel and Rory Loughnane. 1584: Academic Perspectives from Cambridge University Press. 10 June 2022.

“Ruminating on Ruin: The Renaissance Kinship between Memory and Mortality.” 1584: Academic Perspectives from Cambridge University Press. 31 October 2022.

Recent Graduate Courses

• 2022—ENGL 6003: Theories and Foundations (Topic: Shakespeare’s Sonnets)
• 2022—ENGL 5303/4301: Studies in Early Modern Literature I (Topic: Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Image, Memory, and Fantasy)
• 2021—ENGL 6003: Theories and Foundations in the Production of Literature (Topic: Authorship)
• 2021—ENGL 6004: Approaches to the Production of Literature (Topic: Authorship)
• 2020—ENGL 6003: Theories and Foundations in the Production of Literature (Topic: Book History)
• 2018—ENGL 5303/4301: Studies in Early Modern Literature I (Topic: Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Between Recollection and Phantasy)