Academic Profile

Amy Boesky (Director, English Department Honors Program) teaches and researches in several fields, primarily seventeenth-century British literature and creative nonfiction. She is author of What We Have (Gotham Books, 2010), a memoir about her family’s experience with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. She is currently editing a collection of personal essays on genetics and identity for Johns Hopkins Univ. Press (The Story Inside), and her new work studies discourses of genetic identity, ‘genetic memoir,’ and medical humanities.

Boesky’s recent creative nonfiction appears (or is forthcoming) from Memoir (and), Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and Kenyon Review Online.

Her publications on 17^th century British literature include a book on utopias (Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England, University of Georgia Press, 1996) and articles on topics such as technologies of timekeeping; early modern museums; Milton and sunspots; Milton’s heaven as dystopia; and elegy, mourning and memory.

Publications (selected)

• What We Have Gotham Books (August 5, 2010).
• "Milton and the New World” in Milton in Context, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski
  (Cambridge Univ Press, 2010).
• Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England (1996).
• Ed., with Mary Crane, Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (2000).
• "Double time: Women, Watches, and the Gift of Eternity," The Double Voice: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England (2000).
• "Milton, Galileo and Sunspots: Optics and Certainty in Paradise Lost," Milton Studies,
  Vol. 34 (Winter, 1997), 23-42.