Dr. Stephen Pender

Junior Chair in Faculty of Arts and Social Science

Stephen Pender, B. A., with high distinction (Toronto), M.A. (Queen's), Ph.D. (Toronto), is a specialist in the poetry and prose of early modern Britain, intellectual history, the history of medicine, and the history of rhetoric. Recently, he has published articles in Rhetorica, Early Science and Medicine, the British Journal for the History of Science, and the Dalhousie Review, as well as a number of chapters in collections of essays. He is currently at work on the relationship between rhetoric, medicine, and emotion in early modern England, medical thought in contemporary historiography, early modern ethics, the history of the imagination, and laughter. His work opens new ground in intellectual history, specifically the relationship between rhetoric, medicine, and forms of probable inference in early modern Europe. Dr. Pender has presented over thirty 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 and to Leiden University for a conference and collection of essays on pain in early modern Europe. In 2003, he co-edited The Common Sky: Canadian Writers against the War in Iraq (Three Squares Press); he is poetry editor for Three Squares, on the educational advisory board for The Walrusmagazine, and has just published his first collection of poetry, Histologies (Toronto, 2007). With Nancy Struever, emeritus, Johns Hopkins University, he is editing a collection of essays on rhetoric and medicine in early modern Europe, and this year his monograph, Essaying the Body: Rhetoric, Medicine, and Emotion in Early Modern England, which was supported by a SSHRCC grant in intellectual history, will be finished. Dr. Pender is currently director of the Humanities Research Group, University of Windsor, and has been graduate chair in English (2005-2006), where he is an associate professor.