John C. Coldewey
Professor
Emeritus
Department of
English, Box 354330
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
email: jcjc@u.washington.edu
FAX: (206) 685-2673
"I
cannot
describe to you my sensations on the near prospect of my undertaking.
It is impossible to communicate to you a conception of the trembling
sensation, half pleasurable and half fearful, with which I am preparing
to depart . . . .There is
something at work in my soul which I do not understand. I am
practically
industrious--painstaking, a workman to execute with perseverance and
labour--but besides this there is a love for the marvelous, a belief in
the marvelous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me
out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited
regions I am about to explore. . ."
--Mary
Shelley, Frankenstein
John C. Coldewey, Professor Emeritus of English at the University
of
Washington, has published widely in the areas of medieval and
renaissance drama. He acted as Director of English Graduate Studies
from 1995-1999, leaving to take a National Endowment for the
Humanities Fellowship (1999-2000) and sabbatical (2000-2001). With
Brian P. Copenhaver he has
co-edited two volumes in the Renaissance
Latin Drama in England
series (1984, 1991) and another 17th-century
neo-Latin play, Pseudomagia (1979).
For ten years (1983-94) he
was
Editor of Modern Language Quarterly
(helping its transformation
into
MLQ:
A Journal of
Literary History in 1993). With Marianne Briscoe he
brought out Contexts for Early
English Drama (1989). His collection of non-cycle plays, Early
English
Drama: An Anthology (Garland Publishing), appeared in 1993,
and
another
anthology, edited with W.R. Streitberger, Drama:
Classical to
Contemporary
(Prentice Hall), in 1998, with a revised edition appearing in 2001.
Recent
work has appeared in the Cambridge
Companion to Medieval English
Theatre
(ed. by Richard Beadle, 1994; rev. ed. by Richard Beadle and Alan
Fletcher, 2007), Festive
Drama (ed. Meg Twycross,
1996),
European Medieval Drama Vols. I
(1997), II (1998), and III
(2000).
His chapter "From Roman to Renaissance in Drama and Theatre" appeared
in the New Cambridge History of British
Theatre (3
Vols.; ed. by Jane Milling and Peter Thomson, 2004).
His four-volume collection, Medieval
Drama: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies,
was published by Routledge in July
2007. Professor Coldewey retired in June
2010.
John Coldewey has served on the University Center
for Teaching and Learning with Technology Faculty Advisory Board (a
component of UWired)
and
the Department of English
Placement Committee. He served as Secretary-Treasurer,
Vice-President, and President of the Council
of Editors of Learned Journals (1988-93). He was twice elected
President of The
Friends of UW Libraries (1995-96) and as Vice-President of the Medieval and
Renaissance Drama Society (MRDS), an allied organization of the MLA. He was the American representative
on the European
Medieval Drama Council (1995-99). He also recently
served on the University of Washington Faculty Senate Executive
Committee, the College of Arts and Sciences Standing
Committee for Department
of Scandinavian Studies, and the English Department Graduate
Studies Committee.
This Web page can be found at http://faculty.washington.edu/jcjc/;
it was updated on September 14, 2010