Michael Ullyot

I specialize in early modern literature and culture. My research is on biographies, rhetoric, and the history of reading. I'm writing a book about exemplarity and biography in early modern England, or the ways that famous stories influenced people's self-consciousness about their own future fame. I've published articles on elegies, dedications, modernized Chaucers, and Senecan drama. 

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My teaching interests range from Anglo-Saxon poetry to Restoration drama, but I focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, prose, and drama. My goal is to encourage critical and irreverent thinking in my students, expressed in oral and written arguments that are clear, logical, and substantive. (See my guide to Effective Critical Writing.)

Virtuous Lies: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England. A book on the forms, rhetoric, and historical occasions of early modern biography and the rhetoric of exemplarity, as viewed by new historicist and algorithmic modes of literary criticism. Funded by a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a URGC Starter Grant, University of Calgary.

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