About Frank Whigham

After receiving my Ph.D. from UCSD in 1976 and teaching at Northwestern University and Claremont Graduate School, I came to the University of Texas in 1985. I hold the Arthur J. Thaman and Wilhelmina Doré Thaman Professorship of English, and serve currently as the English Department's Graduate Studies Chair. My teaching ranges from large lecture classes on the history of British literature to advanced courses that focus on different forms of Renaissance literature to graduate seminars on the interactions of literature and culture in early modern England.

My scholarship addresses a variety of early modern English topics: letters of supplication, sexual and social mobility, livery conventions, the early modern alimentary tract, flattery and desire, anxious masculinity, heirs, reluctant agency, and risk, among others. I've written longer works about courtly conduct (Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory: California, 1984) and the interplay among family, status, gender, and service relations in the drama (Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama: Cambridge 1996). Currently I'm at work on a new edition of George Puttenham's Art of English Poesy (1589), a work of literary theory and courtly conduct, forthcoming from Cornell (co-edited with Wayne Rebhorn). The pre-Elizabethan sixteenth century and early modern religion are growing new interests for me. The principal inspiration for my approach to literary and cultural studies, which might be titled "against master narratives," derives from reading Kenneth Burke, Lawrence Stone, Pierre Bourdieu, and Harry Berger, Jr.

I grew up in southern California, grandson of a Dust Bowl migrant worker, son of a native Californian carpenter and a genteel Memphis lady from different worlds, who met in the demographic stir of World War II. As a result, I'm also a hiker and photographer. My favorite destination is the desert, especially red-rock mesa and slot-canyon country of the Four Corners region in Arizona and Utah. I like austere monochrome desert landscapes, images of the passing of time, and found-art photographs of building materials and trash. As William Faulkner said somewhere, "the past isn't dead; it isn't even past."