Associate Professor
409 McClung Tower
awelch8@utk.edu
Biography
Anthony Welch specializes in Renaissance literature and culture. His scholarly research focuses on John Milton and seventeenth-century poetry, the European epic tradition, and relations between orality and literacy. His book, The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past, shows how the period’s 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. Dr. Welch’s current research explores how epic poetry and other traditional literary forms were adapted to tell early modern stories of global exploration, intercultural encounter, and colonial conquest.
Dr. Welch teaches undergraduate courses on Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and the literature of late Renaissance Europe. Recent graduate courses include The Age of 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
- B.A., University of Western Ontario
- M. Phil., Trinity College, Cambridge
- Ph.D., Yale University
Publications
- The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past (Yale University Press, 2012)
Representative Articles
- “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.
- “Editing Paradise Lost with Richard Bentley,” in Approaches to Teaching Milton’s Paradise Lost, ed. Peter C. Herman (Modern Language Association, 2012), 131-35.
- Poetic Tradition, Epic,” in Milton in Context, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 68-77.
- “The Cultural Politics of Dido and Aeneas,” Cambridge Opera Journal 21 (2009): 1-26.
- “Milton’s Forsaken Proserpine,” English Literary Renaissance 39 (2009): 527-56.
- “Epic Romance, Royalist Retreat, and the English Civil War,” Modern Philology 105 (2008): 570-602.