Faculty Leaders

Helen Brooks

PhD '80, senior lecturer emerita of English and the program of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies

Helen Brooks is a senior lecturer emerita in the Department of English. Her teaching includes courses on John Donne, Shakespeare, Renaissance/Early Modern poetry, Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, graduate seminars on Renaissance/Early Modern intellectual and cultural history, and theoretical approaches to literature. Other research and teaching interests include interdisciplinarity, new historicism; literature and the advent of mathematical perspective and the modern scientific method of inquiry; reception theory (including cognitive studies and the neurosciences), gender studies, evolutionary theory and literature, modern poetry and drama.

Professor Brooks is a leading scholar of John Donne, an English Renaissance poet, and has published several articles on his work. She has also written on St. Ignatius Loyola and his contribution to early modern poetry and on the poetry of John Davies of Hereford. She served as a contributing editor for The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne: The Holy Sonnets, Vol. 7 published by Indiana University Press in 2005.