{Home > People > Faculty > Senate Faculty > Margaret W. Ferguson}---------------

Margaret Ferguson Chair, Professor of English

Ph.D., Yale University, 1974
M.Phil., Yale University, 1972
A.B., Cornell University, 1969

Professor Ferguson joined the UC Davis faculty as Professor of English in 1997. Before coming to Davis, she taught at Yale, Columbia, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has held visiting professorships at UC Berkeley and Middlebury College (The Bread Loaf School of English). Her areas of interest include Renaissance literature, literacy studies, and feminist theory, and she has published extensively on these topics. Currently, she is a member of the editorial board for Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature and is on the advisory board of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Modern Language Quarterly, and other journals. She has served on the Modern Language Association Executive Committee and has been a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. She has held a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a NEH Fellowship. Professor Ferguson became Chair of the English Department July 2006.

Publication Spotlight

Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France by Margaret Ferguson Dido's Daughters is the winner of the Roland Bainton Prize for Sixteenth Century Studies (2004), the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Prize (2004) and Honorable Mentions for the American Comparative Literature Association's Réné Wellek Prize (2004) and the Renaissance Society of America's Phyllis Goodheart Gordan Book Prize (2004).

• Teaching Early Modern Prose. Ed. Margaret Ferguson. Modern Language Association. Forthcoming 2009.
• The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 5th ed. Ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo
  Salter and Jon Stallworthy. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Essay on "Poetic
  Syntax" by M. Ferguson, 2053-74.
• Women, Poetry, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England.
  Ed. Margaret Ferguson, Nancy Wright and Andrew Buck. Toronto: The
  University of Toronto Press, 2004. M. Ferguson secondary author of
  introduction, 3-22.
• Feminism in Time. Ed. Margaret Ferguson and Marshall Brown. Spec. iss.
  of Modern Language Quarterly 65.1 (March 2004). Introduction by M.
  Ferguson, 7-27.
• Literacies in Early Modern England. Ed. Margaret Ferguson and Eve
  Sanders. Spec. iss. of Critical Survey 14.1 (2002). Editors' introduction, 1-8.
• Cary, Elizabeth. The Tragedy of Mariam, Faire Queen of Jewry (1613)
  and The Lady Falkland: Her Life by one of Cary's daughters. Ed. Barry
  Weller and Margaret Ferguson. Berkeley: University of California Press,
  1994. M. Ferguson primary author of introduction, 1-59.
• Postmodernism and Feminism. Ed. Margaret Ferguson and Jennifer
  Wicke. Spec. iss. of boundary 2 (Summer 1992). Reissued in expanded form
  as a book by Duke University Press, 1993.
• Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in
  Early Modern Europe. Ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and
  Nancy Vickers. Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986. Introduction by
  Margaret Ferguson.
• "1549: An Offensive Defense for a New Intellectual Elite" in The Harvard
  History of French Literature. Ed. Denis Hollier. Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
  Press, 1989, pp. 194-98
• "Hamlet: Letters and Spirits," in Shakespeare and the Question of
  Theory. Ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. New York and London:
  Metheun Press, 1985, pp. 212-38. Reprinted in Hamlet: New Critical Views,
  ed. David Kastan. New York: G.K. Hall, 1995.
• Postmodernism and Feminism. Ed. Margaret Ferguson and Jennifer
  Wicke. Chapel Hill NC: Duke University Press, 1994 

Email: mwferguson@ucdavis.edu