Stephanie Shirilan

Stephanie Shirilan comes to Syracuse from Brandeis University, where she recently completed her dissertation, “The Pleasures of Mimetic Sympathy in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy .” She earned previous degrees from the University of British Columbia and from the Liberal Arts College at Concordia University in Montreal – a trajectory that maps her intersecting interests in cultural critique and canonicity. Shirilan has been an NEH fellow and has written articles on representations of wonder in early modern travel narratives and on the permeability of the skin in the writings of Francis Bacon and Robert Burton. Her book project examines Burton's ethics of pleasure with respect to the mind/body ‘problem' in early seventeenth-century natural philosophy. Her research interests lie in the rhetorical histories of the body, medicine, science, and empire, with principal concern for representations of bodily, textual, and cultural contact. She teaches courses that emphasize the developing discourses of embodied selfhood and knowledge in seventeenth century prose and theater.

Areas of Supervision: I will supervise students of late Renaissance and 17 th century English literature, especially those with research interests in the conceptual histories of the body, disease, imagination, subjectivity, melancholy, the occult, science, medicine, natural history, natural philosophy, and the literature of discovery and contact. I welcome students working on topics that pertain to spatial, cognitive, and performance theory to discuss their interests with me as well.