2011–12 Ward-Phillips Lecture Series—Missing the Maidenhead: Cultural Debates About Hymeneal Signs

Margaret Ferguson; Distinguished Professor of English; University of California, Davis The lecture series will run April 16–April 18, 2012. Additional lecture information is below. * Tuesday, April 17: Hymeneal Instruction, or Teaching (the) Hymen's Moment * Wednesday, April 18: Milton’s Hymens and Their Implications for Our Time

In addition to the University of California, Margaret Ferguson has taught at Yale University, Columbia University, and the University of Colorado Boulder. Her book _Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France_ (University of Chicago Press, 2003) won the Roland Bainton Prize for Sixteenth Century Studies and was the co-winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Prize. Author of _Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry_ and many articles on authors ranging from St. Augustine to Elizabeth Cary to Freud, Ferguson has co-edited 13 books and special issues of journals. Among these are _Teaching Early Modern Prose_ (with Susannah Brietz-Monta), _Feminism in Time_, _and The Norton Anthology of Poetry_. Ferguson has served on many committees of the Modern Language Association and will become president in 2015. She also has served on the executive board of the Renaissance Society of America and as a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. She received teaching awards at Yale and the University of Colorado and an Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award at the University of California, Davis. Chair of the U.C. Davis English department from 2006 to 2009, she has won fellowships from the NEH, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and, most recently, from the American Council of Learned Societies to support research for her current book, "Missing the Maidenhead: Cultural Debates About the Hymen in Early Modern England." The Ward-Phillips Lecture Series is funded by the Yusko Endowment for the English Department.