Biography
Brice Peterson joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 2021. He completed his BA in English and Russian (’13) at Brigham Young University and his MA (’15) and PhD (’19) at Penn State University. He met his wife Rebecca while taking two English classes (Victorian Literature and Literary Theory), and they are the proud parents of four delightful children (including a set of twins): Darcy, Bingley, Knightley, and Dashwood.
Research Interests
Research Interests: I am interested in knowledge taxonomies in early modern English literature, specifically how knowledge is represented, organized, and interrogated. My research often examines the intersections of three knowledge domains (theology, medicine, and genre) to investigate how poets and playwrights rethink religious doctrines, medical theories, and generic conventions. I am particularly interested in the work of Aemilia Lanyer, Edmund Spenser, and Christopher Marlowe.I am currently co-editing a new critical edition of Aemilia Lanyer’s poetry (Oxford UP) with Susanne Woods and The Cambridge Companion to Aemilia Lanyer with Kimberly Johnson. Additionally, I am editing a special issue of Explorations in Renaissance Culture entitled “Aemilia Lanyer and the Body,” which is forthcoming Winter 2025. I am also working on a chapter that explores Galenic humoralism in Marlowe’s plays for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook to Christopher Marlowe.
Publications:
[w/ Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr.] “Living and Dying in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,” Renaissance Drama 53, no. 1 (2025): forthcoming.
“Aphra Behn’s Rewriting of Spenserian Pastoral” in Spenser and Women Writers, ed. Susanne Wofford and Mihoko Suzuki (Oxford University Press), forthcoming.
“Rivers of Milk, Honey, Tears, and Treasure: Mapping Salvation in Early Modern Devotional Poetry” in Reading the River in Shakespeare’s Britain, ed. Lisa Hopkins and Bill Angus (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 21-41.
“Medicine, Diagnosis, and Moral Authority in The Pardoner’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 59, no. 4 (2024): 437–71.
“Aemilia Lanyer, Edmund Spenser, and the Literary Hymn,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15, no. 2 (2021): 3-28.
“‘Pricking on the Plaine’: Romance and Recursive Regeneration in The Faerie Queene, Book I,” Studies in Philology 118, no. 1 (2021): 43-69.
“George Herbert’s Literary Career as a Holy Laureate,” in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 59, no. 1 (2019): 113-34.
“Pregnancy and Anxiety: Medicine, Religion, and the Occult in Cotton Mather’s The Angel of Bethesda,” in American Literature and the New Puritan Studies, ed. Bryce Traister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 126-41.