Theresa DiPasquale
Gregory M. Cowan Professor of English Language and Literature
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Olin Hall 226
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509-526-4710
Professor DiPasquale retired from teaching at the end of the Spring 2024 semester, having taught at Whitman College since the fall of 1998. Before coming to Whitman, she taught at Sweet Briar College, Carleton College, and Florida International University in North Miami, Florida. She is an active scholar with a wide variety of interests: a past president and current member of the John Donne Society and a member of the Renaissance Society of America. Over the course of her career, she has taught courses on Renaissance literature; drama; Shakespeare; African and African Diaspora appropriations of Shakespeare; Milton’s Paradise Lost; the poetry of John Donne; Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: and the presence of Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne in 20th- and 21st-Century Poetry and Drama; and a first year seminar in the Time Learning Community (in which we studied time across the disciplines, from physics and geology to philosophy history, and poetry); “Badass Women, 1559-1668”; “Many Magicks!” (on magic in literature from the Vedas to the short stories of Nnedi Okorafor and Ted Chiang); “Neal Stephenson’s Anathem: An Interdisciplinary Adventure”; and “Black Shakespeares” (on African Diaspora appropriations, revisions, and re-envisionings of Shakespeare’s plays). Her current research projects focus on the global influence of the Renaissance devotional poet George Herbert, the relationship between John Donne's writings and those of King James VI and I, and the enduring power of John Donne's sonnet "Batter my heart, three person'd God."
Ph.D. English Language and Literature
University of Virginia
1989
M.A. English Language and Literature
University of Virginia
1985
B.A. English
University of Notre Dame
1983
Selected Teaching-Related Materials
- Hypertext Editions of Contemporary American Poems from English 491A, Fall 2017: "Echo, Riposte, Renewal." Thanks to all four poets--Daisy Fried, Mark Jarman, Kimberly Johnson, and Monica Youn--and to all four student editors for permission to include their work in this mini-anthology.
- "'No Man Is an Island': Contagion, Community, and Writing in Early Modern England." Video lecture for COVID-19: A Liberal Arts Approach to the Study of a Global Pandemic." Interdisciplinary Online course, Spring 2020, coordinated by Professor Shampa Biswas for incoming students in the Whitman College class of 2024.
Books:
Refiguring the Sacred Feminine: The Poems of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2008.
Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999; Cambridge, England: James Clarke, 2001.
Recent Publications:
"‘New Alchimie’: Reading John Donne's ‘Nocturnall’ Through Poems by Kimberly Johnson and Alice Fulton,” Connotations: A Journal of Critical Debate 30 (2021). https://www.connotations.de/issue/vol-30/
“Prosody, Poetics, and Mutability in Donne’s ‘Spring’ (‘Love’s Growth’) and Shakespeare’s Sonnets 115-116.” Modern Philology 117.4 (May 2020): 470-496.
“Da Kine Shakespeare: James Grant Benton’s Twelf Nite O Wateva!” in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, ed. Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson. New York: Routledge, 2020. 181-192.
“Ways of Reading Donne’s St. Paul’s Epitaph: Close, Comparative, Contextu[r]al, Concrete.” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 27 (2018). https://www.connotations.de/issue/vol-27/
"‘Lunatique’ Satire: Jonsonian Audacity, Lunar Astronomy, and Anne of Denmark in Donne’s Ignatius His Conclave. Studies in Philology 115.1 (Winter 2018): 99-128.
For a complete list of publications, please see Professor DiPasquale's curriculum vitae.
The Louis Round Wilson Prize for the best essay published in 2018 in the journal Studies in Philology for "‘Lunatique’ Satire: Jonsonian Audacity, Lunar Astronomy, and Anne of Denmark in Donne’s Ignatius His Conclave,” Studies in Philology 115.1 (Winter 2018): 99-128.
Whitman College Alumni Association Faculty Award for Service, 2014
For “From Here to Aeviternity: Donne’s Atemporal Clocks” (Modern Philology 110.2) — John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication, 2012
For Refiguring the Sacred Feminine: The Poems of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton (Duquesne University Press, 2008) — John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication, 2008
For “Donne’s Epigrams: A Sequential Reading” (Modern Philology 104.3) — John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication, 2007
For Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne (Duquesne University Press, 1999) — John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication, 2000
Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, University of Notre Dame, 1983