Renaissance Studies for A Different Time

M y contribution to this fiftieth anniversary celebration of the publication of English Literary Renaissance must begin with a shout out to Arthur F. Kinney whose energetic leadership of ELR and of the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies has contributed somuch to our field. I owe a special debt to Arthur for generously publishing my essay, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” in ELR in 1984. That decision gave my career a tremendous boost in the days when I was a fledgling in Renaissance studies, and Arthur repeated it many times over for other newcomers to the field. Those who take time from their own scholarship to edit top-tier journals deserve abundant thanks from all of us.Without them the scholarly conversations and the publishing opportunities we all rely onwould dwindle. So, thank you, Arthur, most sincerely. I am going to use my time in this short essay to write a little about the current state of Renaissance studies, but also about our discipline and American academia more broadly. I will write in a personal vein because in a few years I will be retiring frommy formal academic position and from many of the daily activities of mentoring, teaching, writing, and even administering that I have loved so dearly. Consequently, I have recently been thinking about the field as I have known it and as I see it taking new shapes around me. Let me start by saying that I was historically lucky to come into the academy as an Assistant Professor in 1975. As part of the wave of women carried into academia on the rising tide of feminist activism, I have all my career felt gratitude to the many people whose struggles made it possible for young women like me to teach, write, and do research at the university level, in my case first at Syracuse University and then at Columbia. As a young scholar, the critical excitement that overtook our field in the 1980s and 1990s was, moreover, positively intoxicating. Deconstruction, new historicism, Marxism, feminism, queer studies,