About Bill Engel
(View My Full CV here) [updated: 18.xi.11]
A Professor of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, I teach primarily Chaucer, Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, and Milton. It is also my pleasure periodically to take on Elizabethan Poetry, 19th century American Fiction, and Modern British Poetry. For eight years I have been an Assistant Director at Camp Horseshoe in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where, among other happy duties, I coordinate the Fishing Program, run the Fencing Club, and assist in organizing and taking out camping trips.
In addition to contributing to collections of essays in early modern studies and publishing a variety of encyclopedia entries, I am the author of five books: four on intellectual history and literature, Mapping Mortality (Univ of Mass Press, 1995), Death and Drama (Oxford Univ Press, 2002), Chiastic Designs (Ashgate, 2009), and Early Modern Poetics in Melville and Poe: Memory, Melancholy, and the Emblematic Tradition (Ashgate, 2012); as well as a book on teaching and learning, Education & Anarchy (Univ Press of America, 2001). For my current projects, please go to Books in Progress. My reviews of books appear with some regularity in journals such as Seventeenth-Century News, The Sewanee Review, and Carmina Philosophiae: Journal of The International Boethius Society.
I carried out several years of intensive dissertation research primarily at the Warburg Institute in London (working with Charles Schmitt and J. B. Trapp) and at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California (where I was thoroughly if informally tutored by John Steadman and Fredson Bowers). In 1987 I received my Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley with a dissertation (directed by Jonas Barish) on classical and late-medieval antecedents in seventeenth-century prose. I went on to teach Great Books, literary survey courses, and graduate seminars in Renaissance Intellectual History at Vanderbilt University, where I won the Ernest A. Jones Award for excellence in undergraduate advising.
Beginning in 1996 as Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Philosophy of Education Research Center (working with Israel Scheffler), I developed a program using the classics in educational leadership seminars that led to my providing Continuing Legal Education credits in Ethics and Professionalism for lawyers in the mid-South, as well as a series of trustee education programs for Health Care professionals. In addition to serving as an Educational Consultant for the Tennessee Commission on Holocaust Education and more recently the Nashville Holocaust Memorial, I have also worked as a design team consultant on a variety of projects ranging from middle school math and life-skills programs to integrating arts-based curriculum system-wide. I serve periodically as an adjudicator for grant proposals for Geiko Life Fellowships and the Golden Key Honor Society through Internatinal Scholaship and Tuition Services.
The professional organizations I am affiliated with include the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Renaissance Society of America, World Association for Case Method Research and Application, and the Modern Language Association in which I served a three-year term on the Delegate Assembly. I have been on the executive boards of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars and the Sixteenth Century Studies Society. I have read and assessed books in manuscript for presses such as Palgrave-Macmillan and Harper/Collins.
A life-long fencer (a few years back ranked nationally in epee), I am a certified foil instructor and an approved director of foil, epee, and sabre through the United States Fencing Association. I am currently in charge of the fencing program at Sewanee. I have led workshops for the Nashville Shakespeare Festival and choreographed stage combat for productions including All's Well that Ends Well, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and Calderon's Life is a Dream. More recently I served as the dramaturge for the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's production of Hamlet and led workshops about the play for regional teachers.
With my trusty Irish terrier, Albie, by my side, and as the father of three children, I have became quite expert at outdoors games, drivers' education, and enforcing curfews. For my own down-time, in addition to enjoying an enclosed suburban garden, I delight in wandering old cities (most memorably Richmond and Krakow, Jerusalem and Munich) and taking in theatre, opera, and the odd gallery. I have been told I shoot a passable game of pool; and I can still tie a fly, read a river, and navigate by the stars.