Dr. Marion Hollings
Professor of English

Member, Doctoral Faculty

Office: PH 316A; Phone/Voice Mail: 898-2713

Professor of English, former Director of Graduate Studies in English, and Lecturer in Women’s Studies, Marion Hollings teaches classes and pursues research interests addressing issues of race and gender in British and European literature of the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance. Her courses include Early Women Writers, Sixteenth-Century British Literature, Desire in History and Literature, and Feminist Theory on the undergraduate level, and on the graduate level, seminars in Spenser, Bibliography and Research, and Sixteenth-Century British Poetry and Prose.  She has attended NEH-funded seminars at The Ohio State University, West Virginia University, and The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.  Her research has taken her to the Bodleian and British Libraries, the Library of Congress, and the Folger, and has yielded papers presented at Yale University, Cambridge University, The Centre for Medieval and Tudor Studies, University of Kent, Canterbury, and The Centre for Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, among numerous other institutions.  She was nominated for a Woman of Achievement Award in 1995 and won the Ayne Cantrell Award for Women’s Studies in 2000.  In 2006, she won an Award for Outstanding Mentoring from Disabled Student Services at MTSU.

See PUBLICATIONS

PRESENTATIONS (Since 1995)

• “India, Faerieland, and Hybridity in Shakespeare and Spenser.” Shakespeare Association of America, Bermuda, March 2005.
• “Early Women Writers.” Interdisciplinary Conference in Women's Studies, Murfreesboro, TN, March 2005.
• “The Uses of Literature to Increase Appreciation for Diversity.” International Conference on Cultural Diversity. Nashville, TN, October 2003.
• “Translation, Transnation, Race: Spenser's Irish Vewe and the Turk.” Women's Studies Research Series, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, November 2003.
• “Faculty Research Partnerships: Library of Congress and Middle Tennessee State University English 6/7660.” Fourth Annual University-wide Showcase of Faculty Research and Creativity. Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN ,May 2003.
• “Romancing the Turk: Trade, Race, Nation in Early Modern Romance and Travel Narrative.” Group for Early Modern Culture Studies, Tampa , FL , October 2002. [Also presented at the Graduate Student/Faculty Research Symposium. English Graduate Program. Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, November 2002.]
• “Sarazin, Paynim, and Other Strangers:  Spenser’s Discourses of Orientalism in The Faerie Queene.”  The Place of Spenser:  Words, Worlds, Works, Pembroke College, Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, July 2001.
• "Early Modern European Travel Narratives and Discourses of Barbarism.”  Between Empires:  Orientalism before 1600, Trinity College, Cambridge University, England, July 2001.
• “Representations of India in Early Modern Travel Literature.”  Interdisciplinary Conference on Mysticism, Reason, Art, Literature:  East West Perspectives, Ferrum College, Virginia, September 2000.
• “Temperaunce, Turkish Baths, and the Threat of Islam:  Bathing in Spenser’s Paradise.”  Virile Women, Consuming Men:  Gender and Monstrous Appetites in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, April 2000.
• “Gender, Gardens, and Orientalism in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss.”  Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, Tempe, Arizona, May 1999.
• “Medieval Women’s Mystical Writing and the Courtly Love Tradition,” Lecture. The Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, Osage Monastery, Sand Springs, Oklahoma, July 1998.
• “Spiritual Narratives: Theory and Tradition,” Organizer and Chair, International Society for the Study of European Ideas, Haifa University, Israel, August 1998.
• “Early Modern Women’s Autobiographical Writings and the Limits of New Historicism.”  Canterbury Centre for Medieval and Tudor Studies, University of Kent, Canterbury, England, May 1997.
• “Abjection and Authority in The Legende of Holinesse.” The Faerie Queene in the World:  1596-1996. Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, September 1996.
• “Reprocessing the Subject of History in the Renaissance.”  International Society for the Study of European Ideas, Utrecht, The Netherlands, August 1996.
• “Consuming the Textual Body,” Chair. Virile Women, Consuming Men:  Gender and Monstrous Appetites in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, April 2000.
• “Spanish and Portuguese,” Chair.  Marvels and Commonplaces in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association Conference, Tempe, Arizona, May1999.
• “Milton and Women Writers,” Chair.  The 1997 Conference on John Milton. Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, October 1997.
• “Gender Issues I,” Chair. Southeastern Medieval Association, Nashville, Tennessee, September 1997.

WORK IN PROGRESS

• The Strange Women of “The Faerie Queene” and Spenser’s Discourses of Orientalism.  A study of sexuality and ethnographic elements in the figures of Duessa, Acrasia, Phaedria, and Britomart, among others, set within literary and historical contexts including the romance tradition and early modern European travel accounts of the East.