{Home > People > Faculty > Senate Faculty > Frances E. Dolan}---------------

Frances E. Dolan Professor of English

Ph.D.The University of Chicago, 1988
B.A. Loyola University, 1982

Professor Dolan joined the UC Davis faculty as Professor of English in 2003. Before coming to Davis, she taught at Miami University, as well as the University of Chicago and Columbia University. Her areas of interest include early modern English literature and history (1500-1700), Shakespeare, feminist theory, women's writing, Catholicism, domestic violence, crime and the law. She has published essays on topics including battered women who kill, witchcraft, cosmetics, Catholic women, and the London Fire, in collections and journals such as differences, Feminist Studies, English Literary Renaissance, the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly, the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, and the Huntington Library Quarterly. She has served as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America.

Dolan is currently working on a study of standards of evidence in seventeenth-century England and in recent studies of that period. She is the director of Undergraduate Studies in the department and the coordinator of the Davis Humanities Institute's early modern research cluster.

Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy by Frances E. Dolan "Why does marriage so often lead to violence? In her timely and important new book, Frances Dolan identifies the culprit: an 'economy of scarcity' that modern marriage inherits from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Powerfully argued and wonderfully well documented, Marriage and Violence provides a rare example of how historical scholarship can illuminate the present."—Richard Helgerson, University of California, Santa Barbara University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

Selected Publications:

• “Why Are Nuns Funny?”  Huntington Library Quarterly 70.4 (December 2007):  1-26.
• Whores of Babylon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.
• Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
• The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts. Boston: Bedford Books, 1996.
• Five Plays for the New Pelican Shakespeare (As You Like It, Comedy of Errors, Richard II, Timon of Athens, Winter's Tale)