Ramie Targoff

Professor of English

targoff@brandeis.edu
781-736-2148
Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for the Humanities, 107

Departments/Programs

English
Italian Studies
Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Degrees

University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D.
Yale University, B.A.

Expertise

Renaissance English and Italian literature. Shakespeare. Religion and literature. Renaissance women's literature.

Profile

Professor Targoff teaches and studies Renaissance literature, with emphases on lyric poetry and women's writing. She has written books on the invention of common prayer; on the works of the poet and preacher John Donne; and on Renaissance love poetry. Her latest book, a biography of Vittoria Colonna, was published in 2018, and her translation from Italian of Colonna's 1538 Rime, the first book of poetry ever published by a woman in Italy, will appear in print in the fall of 2020. She is currently writing a new book called Shakespeare's Sisters, a joint biography of four women writers in Renaissance England, which is due to be published in 2022. Webpage

Courses Taught

COML/HUM	21a	Renaissance Literary Masterpieces
ENG	33a	Shakespeare
ENG	50a	Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
ENG	73a	Witchcraft and Magic in the Renaissance
ENG	183b	Gods and Humans in the Renaissance
ENG	243a	Women and the Renaissance

Awards and Honors

Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association (2016)

Short-list, Christian Gauss Award, Phi Betta Kappa Society (2015)

American Academy in Rome Scholar in Residence (2012)

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2012 - 2013)

American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2009 - 2010)

Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Fellowship (2003 - 2004)

Best Book of the Year Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature (2001 - 2002)

Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarship among Junior Faculty in the Humanities (2000 - 2001)

Morse Fellowship, Yale University (1998 - 1999)

National Endowment for the Humanities Dissertation Year Grant (1995 - 1996)

Scholarship

Targoff, Ramie. ""Marriage and Sacrifice: The Poetics of the Epithalamia"." Spenser and Donne: Thinking Poets. n/a ed. vol. n/a Ed. Yulia Ryzhik. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2019. 171-182.

Targoff, Ramie. ""Donne's Patristic Leaven"." John Donne Journal 34. Special Issue (2018): 59-78.

Targoff, Ramie. "Love and Death in Egypt and Rome." Memoria di Shakespeare: A Journal of Shakespeare Studies 4. n/a (2018): 61-72.

Targoff, Ramie. "Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare." Rev. of Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, by William Kennedy. Modern Philology vol. 115 of 2 September 2017: E216-E218.

Targoff, Ramie. "Writing Beloveds: Humanist Petrarchism and the Politics of Gender." Rev. of Writing Beloveds: Humanist Petrarchism and the Politics of Gender, by Aileen A. Feng. Speculum vol. 93/2 of n/a 2018: 496-98.

Targoff, Ramie. Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018.

Targoff, Ramie, and Jussen, Bernhard, eds.. Love after Death: Concepts of Posthumous Love in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. 1st ed. Germany: De Gruyter, 2015.

Targoff, Ramie. Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England. first ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Targoff, Ramie, and Stephen Greenblatt, eds.. Religio Medici and Urne-Burial. 1st ed. New York: New York Review of Books, 2012.

Targoff, Ramie. "Mortal Love: Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and the Practice of Joint Burial." Representations 120. 1 (2012): 17-34.

Targoff, Ramie. ""Passion: Petrarch to Wyatt"." Cultural Reformations: From Lollardy to the English Civil War. first ed. vol. n/a Ed. James Simpson and Brian Cummings. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010

Targoff, Ramie. John Donne, Body and Soul. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Ramie Targoff. "Traducing the Soul: Donne's Second Anniversarie." Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) Vol. 121, no. 5. (2006).

Targoff, Ramie. "Facing Death." The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. Cambridge University Press, 2005

Targoff, Ramie. Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England. University of Chicago Press, 2001.