Academic Profile

Amy Boesky 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 researching dilemmas surrounding gene patents and their antecedents in early modern history of science.
Boesky’s research in the seventeenth century includes a book on utopias (Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England, University of Georgia Press, 1996) and an essay collection, co-edited with Mary Crane (Form and Reform: Essays in Honor of Barbara Lewalski, University of Delaware, 2000). She has published articles on early modern literature and culture on topics such as technologies of timekeeping; early modern museums; Milton and sunspots; Milton’s heaven as dystopia; and elegy, mourning and memory in journals such as ELH, Modern Philology, Milton Studies, and SEL. Boesky regularly teaches courses in creative nonfiction, early modern biography and autobiography, Stuart Literature and Culture, and 17th century women’s literature and culture. She also teaches and writes on adolescent fiction, and has recently published an article on Nancy Drew in Studies in the Novel (Summer, 2010).

Courses

• EN081 - Literary Themes
• EN522 - Advanced Creative Nonfiction: Memoir, Biography, Profile
• EN340 - Milton
• EN785 - Stuart Literature and Culture

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.