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Anthony Welch

Anthony Welch

March 9, 2023

headshot photo
ADDRESS
409 McClung Tower
Email
awelch8@utk.edu

Anthony Welch

Associate Professor

Renaissance/Early Modern Literature, Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Epic Tradition, Poetry and Poetics, Genre Theory, Orality and Literacy

Anthony Welch specializes in Renaissance literature and culture. His scholarly research focuses on John Milton, seventeenth-century poetry and poetics, and the European epic tradition. His book The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past shows how early modern epic poets struggled to make sense of ancient oral poetry—from Homeric Greece to Celtic Britain—and how those struggles led to new models of authorship and changing theories about the origins of civilization. His forthcoming survey, The Epic: A Very Short Introduction, explores practices of epic storytelling around the world, from the Western epic canon to the traditional heroic poetry of Asia, Africa, and the Near East. Dr. Welch’s current research explores how European epic poetry and other inherited literary forms were adapted to tell early modern stories of global exploration, intercultural encounter, and colonial conquest. 

Dr. Welch teaches courses on Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and the literature of early modern Europe. Recent graduate courses include Renaissance Epic: Spenser and Milton; Fictions of Authority in Seventeenth-Century England; and Seventeenth-Century Poetry: Critical Approaches and Controversies. He is a recipient of the UT Alumni Association Outstanding Teacher Award, the Carroll Distinguished Teaching Professorship, and the College Convocation Advising Award.

Education

    • Ph.D., Yale University
    • M. Phil., Trinity College, Cambridge
    • B.A., University of Western Ontario

Specialties

Renaissance/Early Modern Literature, Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Epic Tradition, Poetry and Poetics, Genre Theory, Orality and Literacy

Publications

Books

  • The Epic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2025)
  • The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past (Yale University Press, 2012)

Representative Articles

    • “Sixteenth-Century European Influences,” in The Oxford History of Poetry in English, vol. 5, Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Oxford University Press, 2024), 28-40.
    • “Eve’s Dreamwork in Paradise Lost,” MLN 135.5 (2020): 1124-38.
    • “Epic and Community,” in A Companion to World Literature, ed. Ken Seigneurie et al., 6 vols. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 2:1237-42.
    • “Kingdoms of the Mind: Epic Forms, Fragments, and Translations,” in Political Turmoil: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1623-1660, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 60-76.
    • “Paradise Lost and English Mock Heroic,” in Milton in the Long Restoration, ed. Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro (Oxford University Press, 2016), 465-82.
    • “Anthropology and Anthropophagy in The Faerie Queene,” Spenser Studies 30 (2015): 167-92.

 

English

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