Dr. Stephen Pender

Professor

B. A., with high distinction (Toronto), M.A. (Queen's), Ph.D. (Toronto)

Contact

CHN Rm 2107
519 253 3000 ext. 2307
spender@uwindsor.ca

Teaching/Research Areas: 

  • poetry and prose of early modern Britain
  • intellectual history
  • history of medicine
  • history of rhetoric

Biography

Stephen Pender is a specialist in early modern literature and intellectual history, the history of rhetoric, and the history of medicine.  Recently, he has published articles in Rhetorica, Early Science and Medicine, the British Journal for the History of Science, Philosophy and Rhetoric, and the Intellectual History Review, as well as several chapters in collections of essays including, most recently, a paper on the history of laughter, and a forthcoming chapter on John Donne and medicine for Cambridge University Press.  "The Anglican Patient: Boyle and the ‘Medicalized Self’ in Early Modern England,” was just published in The Seventeenth Century (2015)

He is currently at work on the relationship between rhetoric, medicine, and the passions in early modern England, to be published in a monograph, Therapy and the Passions in Early Modern England: Rhetoric, Medicine, Moral Philosophy, which was supported by a SSHRCC grant in intellectual history.  Dr. Pender has presented over forty papers at national and international conferences, and has been invited to the Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry at the University of Iowa to contribute to their 'New Rhetorics, New Histories' project, has been a featured speaker at Scientiae (see http://scientiae.co.uk/), and at a Leiden University for a conference and collection of essays on pain in early modern  Europe. With Nancy Struever, emerita, Johns Hopkins University, he has edited Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2012; his introduction is available for download at http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409430223). 

Dr. Pender was director of the Humanities Research Group, University of Windsor, and held a research leadership chair in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (2006-2012). In 2003, he co-edited The Common Sky: Canadian Writers against the War in Iraq (Three Squares Press); he has been on the educational advisory board for The Walrus magazine (2008-2012); and he has published a collection of verse, Histologies (2007).

  • Stephen Pender, "The 'Anglican Patient': Robert Boyle and the 'Medicalised Self' in Early Modern England," The Seventeenth Century 30. 4 (2015): 455-483
  • Stephen Pender, "The Moral Physiology of Laughter," in Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Beck (London: Chatto and Pickering, 2015), 29-48
  • Stephen Pender, "Heat and Moisture, Rhetoric and Spiritus," Intellectual History Review 24.1 (2013): 1-24
  • Stephen Pender and Nancy J. Struever, eds., Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe 1500 to 1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012)
  • Stephen Pender, "Rhetoric, Grief, and the Imagination in Early Modern England," Philosophy and Rhetoric 43.1 (2010): 54-85
  • Stephen Pender, "Prudence, Decorum, and the 'Square Man,'" Rhetorica 23.4 (2005): 363-400
  • Stephen Pender, "Between Medicine and Rhetoric," Early Science and Medicine 10.1 (2005): 36-64