Degrees Held

B.A., 1970, University of California, Santa Cruz
Ph.D., 1989, University of California, Santa Cruz

Academic Summary

Catherine Martin teaches Milton, Shakespeare, Donne, and seventeenth-century poetry, with special emphases on the philosophy, intellectual history, and literary theory of the period. Her special areas of expertise in this field include Francis Bacon and the scientific revolution, cosmography and nature writing, and literary allegory, in all of which she publishes. Still broader areas of interest include aesthetics, poetics, gender theory, the metaphysical tradition, and contemporary theory and criticism. She serves nationally on the executive committee of the Milton Society of America. She was the 2003-2004 recipient of the Huntington Library's Francis Bacon Foundation Fellowship.

Courses Taught

3210 British Literature before 1798
3213 Seventeenth Century Literature
4232 Shakepeare's Tragedies
4233 Shakespeare's Comedies and Romances
4234 Milton
4335 Shakespeare's Histories
7232 Shakespeare's Tragedies
7242 Renaissance Literature
7254 Seventeenth Century Literature
7256 Milton
7477 History, Culture, Form

Major Publications

• Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early Modern Thought: Essays to Commemorate "The Advancement of Learning (1605-2005), ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin and Julie Robin Solomon. Ashgate, 2005.
• Milton and Gender. ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004.
• "The Erotology of Donne's 'Extasie' and the Secret History of Voluptuous Rationalism." Studies in English Literature 44.1 (Winter 2004): 121-147.
• "The Non-Puritan Ethics, Metaphysics, and Aesthetics of Milton's Spenserian Masque." Milton Quarterly 37 (December 2003): 215-244.
• "The Enclosed Garden and the Apocalypse: Immanent Versus Transcendent Time in Milton and Marvell." Milton and the Ends of Time: Essays on the Apocalypse and the Millennium, ed. Juliet Cummins. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003, 192-200.
• "Unmeete Contraryes: The Reformed Subject and the Triangulation of Religious Desire in Donne's Anniversaries and Holy Sonnets." John Donne and the Protestant Reformation, ed. Mary A Papazian. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 2003, 193-220.
• "The Ahistoricism of the New Historicism: Knowledge as Power versus Power as Knowledge in Bacon's New Atlantis." Faultlines in the Field, ed. Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2002, 22-49.
• "'What If the Sun Be Centre to the World?': Milton's Epistemology, Cosmology and Paradise of Fools Reconsidered." Modern Philology 99.2 (November 2001): 231-265.
• "The Sources of Milton's Sin Reconsidered." Milton Quarterly 35.1 (March 2001): 1-8.
• "The Advancement of Learning and the Decay of the World: A New Reading of Donne's First Anniversary." John Donne Journal 19 (2000): 1-41.
• "Boundless the Deep': Milton, Pascal, and the Theology of Relative Space." ELH 63:1 (1996): 45-78.
• "'Pregnant Causes Mixt': The Wages of Sin and Laws of Entropy in Milton's Chaos, in Arenas of Conflict, ed. Charles Durham and Kristin McColgan. Susquehanna UP, 1997. Winner, Milton Society of America's Irene Samuel Award.
• The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention. Duke U.P, 1998. Winner, Milton Society of America's Holly Hanford Award, 1999.
• "What If the Sun Be Centre to the World?': Milton's Epistemology, Cosmology, and Paradise of Fools Reconsidered. Modern Philology, November 2001.