Office Hours
On Research Leave
Education
PhD, Florida State University
About Me
Deborah Solomon spent the first eighteen years of her life in The Gambia, West Africa, after which she moved to the U.S. to further her education. She traces her deep fascination with language - in all its beauty, versatility, and intriguing deficiency - to those early years of multi-cultural and multi-lingual engagement. In 2015, she received her PhD from Florida State University, where she specialized in early modern poetry and the history of text technologies.
Her first book, The Poem and the Garden: Rival Media in Early Modern England, (Routledge, 2023) argues for a trans-media approach to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century notions of poetic invention. In 2016, this project received a year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, during which time Solomon traveled to the UK to conduct archival work and visit the garden reconstructions at Hampton Court, Holdenby, Lyveden, Kenilworth, and Bolsover.
She has recently begun a second book project, tentatively titled Creative Continuations: Adaptive Practices in Early Modern England, which responds to emerging calls in the field to rethink early modern imitation. By examining practices such as the extension of fictional worlds, the animation of abstract concepts, and the transformation of familiar motifs, the project demonstrates the breadth of adaptive strategies through which writers reimagined inherited materials, offering a more flexible vocabulary for understanding literary production in the period.
Her work has been published in a number of journals, including Spenser Studies, The Seventeenth Century, Modern Philology, and the Ben Jonson Journal.
Solomon won the English Department Award for Teaching Excellence in 2022. Her literature courses tend to focus on the visual and material cultures of the texts she teaches. She often integrates resources and expertise from the university’s Special Collections Library as a way of engaging students in the culture of book history.
Research Interests
medieval and early modern British literature; cultural studies; early material culture; ecocriticism and environmental humanities; genre studies; poetry; women’s and gender studies; textual studies
Publications
The Poem and the Garden in Early Modern England: Rival Media in the Process of Poetic Invention (Routledge, 2022). ISBN 9781032188805. NEH funded.
“The Garden Context of Gabriel Harvey’s ‘Encomium Lauri’,” Spenser Studies 38.1 (2024): 43-72. DOI: 10.1086/728166
“Walking the Commonplaces of Paradise: Pastoral Precursors in Milton’s Garden of Eden.” The Seventeenth Century, 35.6 (2020): 773-798. DOI: 10.1080/0268117X.2019.1627904
“‘All in a Garden Green’: Shakespeare’s Staging of Garden Imagery.” The Ben Jonson Journal 26.2 (2019): 227–252. DOI: 10.3366/bjj.2019.0256
“Representations of Lyric Intimacy in Manuscript and Print Versions of Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’” Modern Philology 111.4 (2014): 668-682. DOI: 10.1086/674918
Courses Taught
ENGL 7850: Studies in Genre
ENGL 7160: Early Modern Studies
ENGL 4800: Seminar in Literature
ENGL 4620: Milton
ENGL 4310: Renaissance English Literature
ENGL 2230: British Literature Before 1789
ENGL 2020: Introduction to Literary Studies