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 two delightful children, Darcy and Bingley.
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.My current work investigates the topics of death and tragedy in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the intertextual relationship between Spenser and Aphra Behn, humoralism in Marlowe's plays, and genre in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. I am currently co-editing The Cambridge Companion to Aemilia Lanyer with Kimberly Johnson, and I am editing a special topics issue on Aemilia Lanyer for Explorations in Renaissance Culture. I am also a contributor in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook to Christopher Marlowe.
Publications:
“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, forthcoming 2024).
“Medicine, Diagnosis, and Moral Authority in The Pardoner’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review, (forthcoming, 2024).
“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.