Dr. Catherine Nicholson

Biography

Catherine Nicholson is a Professor of English at Yale University, with a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on early modern English literature and its reception histories. She is particularly interested in how texts challenge assumptions of literary value, requiring readers to redefine interest, meaning, purpose, and pleasure in unfamiliar ways. Nicholson has authored significant works, including 'Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance' (Penn Press, 2014), which explores how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers and critics perceived contemporary innovations by vernacular poets and their contributions to a new linguistic community. Her other book, 'Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism' (Princeton, 2020), chronicles four centuries of reader struggles with this famously unreadable text. In addition to her academic writings, she contributes to literary periodicals such as the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

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