Grant Williams
Associate Professor
- B.A., M.A. (McMaster University), Ph.D. (University of Western Ontario)
- Email Grant Williams
Research Interests
- Early Modern Rhetoric, Literature, and Psychology/Cognition
- The Memory Arts and Book History
- Fantasy, Imagination, and Interiority
- The Love Arts and Blazons
- The Death Arts and Commemoration
Current Research
I am working on three projects:
1. Renaissance Blazons and Male Fantasy: this project examines the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century blazon–the poetic catalogue that praises the beauty of the beloved’s body parts, enhancing their value and desirability by comparing them to precious objects. By conveying and disrupting male and female fantasies, blazons raise ethical perspectives on gender, the imagination, and interiority in early modern English culture.
2. Renaissance Love Arts: this collaborative project studies the love arts after the same manner that my colleagues Bill Engel and Rory Loughnane and I treated the cultural formations of memory and of death in our critical anthologies The Memory Arts in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 2016) and The Death Arts in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 2022). How was Renaissance love, not just a natural phenomenon, taught and learned through art, artifice, and artifact?
3. Exempla, Commemoration, and Ethics: this project studies the Renaissance exemplum–the rhetorical device that uses a short narrative to demonstrate a moral principle. Exempla shaped early modern books in order to transmit humanist fame, commemorate past figures, and cultivate virtue ethics in their readers.
Recent Books
Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature. Coedited with Mark Kaethler. Palgrave Macmillan: 2024.
Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England. Coedited with William E. Engel and Rory Loughnane. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
The Shakespearean Death Arts: Hamlet among the Tombs. Coedited with William E. Engel. Palgrave Shakespeare Series. Palgrave Macmillan: 2022.
The Death Arts in Renaissance England: A Critical Anthology. Coedited with William E. Engel and Rory Loughnane. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
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.
Recent Essays
“Approaching Canonicity through a Digital Inventory of Exempla: A Response to William E. Engel.” Connotations 34 (2025): 275-288.
“The Revision of Heraldry in Astrophil and Stella: Blazoning Native Nobility through the Impresa.” Sidney Journal 42.2 (2024): 19-44.
“Macrocosmic Proportionality and Commemorative Design in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” South Atlantic Review 89.2 Special Issue: Esoteric Design in Premodern Texts (2024): 96-115.
“Pulter’s Splendent Fame.” The Pulter Project. Web Edition of Pulter’s Poems. April 24. 2024. Peer Reviewed Curation. .
“The Feudal Art of Memory and the Treacherous Imagination: Coveting the Golden Phantasm in Mammon’s House of Trade.” Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature. Ed. by Mark Kaethler and Grant Williams. Palgrave Macmillan: 2024.
“Introduction.” Cowritten with Mark Kaethler. Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature. Ed. by Mark Kaethler and Grant Williams. Palgrave Macmillan: 2024.
“The Lustful Oblivion of Widowhood in The Insatiate Countess.” Memory and Affect in Shakespeare’s England. Ed. by Jonathan Baldo and Isabel Karremann. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023. pp. 68-86.
Recent Presentations
“From Blazons to Exempla: The Economy of Humanist Fame in Lanyer’s Salve Deus.” Renaissance Love Arts and Monumentalizing the Beloved in the Sidney Circle. International Sidney Society. Sixteenth Century Society. Portland, OR. 31 October 2025.
“The Time of the Blazon in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Merchant of Venice.” Lyric Shakespeare. European Shakespeare Research Association. Shakespeare and Time: the retrieved pasts, the envisaged futures. Porto, Portugal. 11 July 2025.
“The Virtue of Remembering: Herostratus, Bookish Fame, and Early Modern Cancel Culture.” Early Modern Virtue Ethics and Literature. The Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies. Toronto, ON. 1 June 2025.
“The Cognitive Work of the Rhetorical Conceit within Sidney’s and Puttenham’s Poetics.” International Sidney Society Session III: Imagination in Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, and Fulke Greville. Sixteenth Century Society Conference. Toronto ON. 1 November, 2024.
“Image, Imagination, and Lovesickness in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.” Materializing Image and Imagination in Seventeenth-Century Literature. Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies. Montreal, QC. 15 June, 2024.
“Dispelling Imaginative Fascination in Robert Burton’s Blazons.” Embodied Imagination in Tudor-Stuart England. Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society. Renaissance Society of America Conference. Chicago IL. March 22, 2024.
“Sidney’s Reinvention of the Heraldic Imagination.” Sidney and Imagination: Heraldic, Visual, and Embodied. The Sixteenth Century Society Annual Conference. Baltimore MD. 27 October, 2023.
“The Shakespearean Death Arts: Hamlet among the Tombs.” Remembering Death in Early Modern England. Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society. Renaissance Society of America Conference. Puerto Rico. 11 March, 2023.
Recent Graduate Courses Taught
- 2025-— ENGL 6004: Approaches to the Production of Literature (Topic: The Renaissance Love Arts and Blazons)
- 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)