Genelle Gertz Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives and Thomas H. Broadus, Jr. Professor of English
Payne 108
540-458-8763
gertzg@wlu.edu
Education
Ph.D., English, Princeton University, 2003
M.A., English, Princeton University, 1998
M.A., English, University of Pittsburgh, 1996
B.A., English & Philosophy, magna cum laude, Wheaton College, 1994
Research
Women mystics; social network analysis of women’s communities; student perception of majors and the humanities; medieval and early modern women writers; the Reformation; republicanism and the English revolution; women’s prophecy and heresy trials; psalm singing and the performance of women’s poetry
Teaching
WRIT 100-First Year Writing Seminar
English 290-Having it All: Life, Literature and Career
English 250-British Literature: Medieval and Renaissance
English 237-The Bible as Literature
English 252-Shakespeare
English 316-The Tudors
English 326-Seventeenth-Century Poetry
English 330-Milton
English 392-Mystics, Witches and Saints
Medieval and Renaissance Studies 110-Romance and Mysticism
Seminar and Capstone Topics
Trials, Torture, and the Truth
The Damned: Hell from Virgil to Milton
Writers and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England
Senior Research and Writing: The Memoir
Selected Publications
Books and Articles
“Teaching a Careers Course for English Majors: Notes from A Liberal Arts Setting,” Association of Departments of English Bulletin (MLA), Special Issue on Careers, forthcoming 2023.
“Framed to the Common Tunes: Song, Community and the Bible in Elizabeth Melville’s Poetry (c. 1590-1640)” in The Bible and Women in Reformation Movements in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Charlotte Methuen and Lothar Vogel (Routledge University Press), forthcoming 2023.
“Prophetic Poetry” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith (Palgrave Macmillan), forthcoming 2023.
“Katherine Evans” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith (Palgrave Macmillan), forthcoming 2023.
“The Lost Network of Elizabeth Barton,” with Pasquale Toscano, Reformation, 26:2 (2021): 105-128. *Winner of the 2022 Grimm Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference for best article on the Reformation.
“Heresies” in Bruce Smith (ed.), Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, Vol I: Shakespeare’s World, 1500-1660, (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 753-759.
“Quaker Mysticism as the Return of the Medieval Repressed: English Women Prophets before and after the Reformation" in Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith (eds.), Mysticism and Reform, 1400-1750 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 177-197.
Heresy Trials and English Women Writers, 1400-1670 (Cambridge University Press, 2012; paperback reissue 2015).
“Barbara Constable’s Advice for Confessors and the Tradition of Medieval Holy Women” in Caroline Bowden and James Kelley (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800 - Communities, Culture and Identity (Ashgate Press: 2013), 123-138.
“Heresy Inquisition and Authorship, 1400-1560” in Mary C. Flannery and Katie L. Walter (eds.), Imagining Inquisition in England, 1215 to 1550 (Westfield Medieval Studies: Boydell and Brewer: 2013), 130-145.
"Stepping into the Pulpit? Women's Preaching in The Book of Margery Kempe and The Examinations of Anne Askew" in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Linda Olson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 459-482. Reprinted in Early Tudor Women Writers, volume one, Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700, ed. Elaine V. Beilin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).
"Still Martyred After All These Years: Generational Suffering in Milton's Areopagitica," ELH (2003): 963-87.
The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, ed. Lorna Sage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Entries on: Anne Askew, Anna Julia Cooper, Eleanor Davies, Esther Sowernam and Ida B. Wells, pp. 23, 151, 171, 591, 658.
Reviews
Review of English Convents in Catholic Europe, 1600-1800 by James Kelly, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 74.4 (Winter 2021):1366-1368.
Review of Mysticism in Early Modern England by Liam Peter Temple, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 59, Issue 4 (October 2020): 922 – 924.
“Milton’s Catholic Shadow,” a review essay of Milton and Catholicism, ed. Ronald Corthell and Thomas N. Corns, British Catholic History, Vol. 34, Issue 2 (October 2018): 332-343.
Review of A history of English autobiography, Prose Studies by Adam Smyth, ed. (2017):2-3, 161-166.
Review of The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century by Ruth Ahnert, Historians of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland E-List (July 2016).
Review of Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life by Gerard Kilroy, Reformation Vol. 21 No.1 (May 2016): 71-73.
Review of Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry by Katherine Little, The Yearbook of Langland Studies 30 (2016): 339-334.
Review of Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing by Julie Eckerle, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 46.2 (2015), 409-11.
Review of Strong Women: Life, Text, and Territory 1347-1645 by David Wallace, Recusant History 31.1 (May 2012): 103-5.
Review of Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Religion and Literature (Autumn 2010): 213-5.
Work In Progress
Monograph. Lost Mystics: Premodern Women and English Revelatory Culture, 1400-1700.
Essay Collection. Co-editor with Jenna Lay. Connected Women: Religion, Text and Network in the Early Modern World.
Qualitative Research with Human Subjects. PI, with Lynny Chin and Elisabeth Gilbert. “Perceptions of Majors and the Humanities among College Students.”