Contact Details

Professor Gerald Maclean
	Department(s): English
	Room: 213 (Queen's Building)
	Telephone: +44 (0)1392 264189 (Internal Ext. 4189)	This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Research Interests

Born in Ontario, I studied at Jesus College, Cambridge and then wrote a MPhil thesis on Blake's Vala manuscript at the University of Waterloo before spending some years teaching in Greece and Libya while writing an unpublished novel. After teaching horseback riding in England, I wrote a doctoral dissertation on the vernacular backgrounds to Dryden's political poetry at the University of Virginia, taught briefly at Queen's University, Kingston, the University of Southern California, and Cornell before settling in Detroit as Professor of English at Wayne State University (1983-2006).

I have published widely on the literature and cultural history of the long seventeenth century in England, focusing on the politics of poetic form, print culture, and the editing of seventeenth-century texts.  My first book, Time's Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603-1660 (1990) examined the development of political poetry during the civil war and republic and led me to edit the English poems on the Restoration (The Return of the King, Etext Center, 1999-2004).  I have also published on editorial theory, gender studies, feminist deconstruction, Marxist theory, and the critique of Orientalism.  With Donna Landry I co-authored Materialist Feminisms (1993) and co-edited The Spivak Reader (1996) and The Country and City Revisited (1999).

During the early 1990s I became increasingly interested in the literary, cultural and historical intersections between the Islamic East and the Christian West during the early modern period, most particularly English and British attitudes towards the Ottoman Empire and Muslim world.  Exploring the ways early travellers challenged traditionally hostile views of the ‘Turks,' The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580-1720 (2004; 2006) appeared in Turkish translation in 2006, while Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (2007) describes the massive cultural influence of the Ottoman Empire on the emergence of English and British imperial ambitions.  With Nabil Matar, I am currently writing Britain and the Muslim World, 1550-1740 for Oxford, a general study of cross-cultural influences that will extend from the Muslim Mediterranean to the Safavid and Mughal Empires.

I have lectured and conducted research in Algeria, Canada, Greece, Libya, Romania, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, and the USA, and have been visiting professor at Bogazici University, Istanbul, and the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies here at Exeter.  In 2004 I was elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2006.

My teaching interests include: Orientalism, seventeenth-century and Restoration literatures, early-modern travel writing, Shakespeare, Anglophone writing and the Ottomans, Milton and the English Revolution, editorial theory and textual criticism, literary theory from Aristotle to Spivak and Said.  I have supervised doctoral dissertations on the following topics: Ben Jonson's Women; Gender Masquerade in Restoration Plays; Thomas Coryate, Travel Writing and Literary Culture in Early Modern England; Literary Ecology and US Culture; Miranda and Caliban After Empire; Female Novelists, Female Readers, Images of Femininity, 1751-1818; Women Writing Epic in England, 1654-1787; The Writings of Nayantara Sahgal; A Critical Introduction to the Writings of Aphra Behn; An Anthropological Reading of John Dryden's Plays; Letters and Letter-Writing in Early Modern England, 1500-1700; Shakespeare's Fairies, Ghosts, Witches and Magic.

I welcome applications from students wishing to work on all aspects of seventeenth-century writing in English; pre-colonial Orientalism; early-modern East-West cultural dialogues, Anglo-Ottoman cultural relations; Renaissance drama including Shakespeare; Milton and Revolution; Restoration literature and culture; critical theory; feminist theory; cultural studies; travel writing; textual criticism and editorial theory.

Publications

Selected Publications

Books

• With Nabil Matar, Britain and the Muslim World, 1550-1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
• Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007)
• Editor, Writing Turkey: Explorations in Turkish History, Politics, and Cultural Identity (London: Middlesex University Press, 2006)
• Editor, Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005)
• The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580-1720
  (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004); rev. paperback 2006; Turkish translation (Istanbul: Yapi Kredi, c. 2007)
• Editor, The Return of the King: An Anthology of English Poems Commemorating the Stuart Restoration, 1660 (E-Text Center, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, 1999-2004)
• Co-editor with Donna Landry and Joseph Ward, The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, c. 1550-1850 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1999); paperback 2006
• Co-editor with Donna Landry, The Spivak Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1996)
• Editor, Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
• Co-author with Donna Landry, Materialist Feminisms (Oxford: Blackwells, 1993)
• Time's Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603-1660 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990)
• Editor, The Woman As Good As The Man, by Poullain de la Barre (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988)
• Recent articles include
• ‘1660,' in Joad Raymond, ed. The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press).
• ‘Milton, Islam and the Ottomans,' in Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
• ‘Strolling in Seventeenth-Century Syria,' in Marius Kociejowski, ed. Syria Through Travellers Eyes (London: Eland, 2006).
• ‘Of Pirates, Slaves and Diplomats: Anglo-American Writing about the Maghrib in the Age of Empire,' in Claire Jowitt ed., Pirates? The Politics of Plunder 1550-1650 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
• ‘Motoring with Mehmet,' in Barnaby Rogerson, ed., Meetings with Remarkable Muslims (London: Eland, 2005), pp. 106-22.
• ‘The Sultan's Beasts: Early English Encounters with the Fauna of the Ottoman Empire,' in Matthew Birchwood and Matthew Dimmock, eds., Cultural Encounters between East and West, 1453 to 1699 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005).
• ‘Strolling in Syria with William Biddulph,' Criticism 46:3 (Summer, 2004): 415-40.
• ‘On Turning Turk, or Trying to: National Identity in Robert Daborne's A Christian Turn'd Turke' Explorations in Renaissance Culture 29:2 (Winter, 2003): 225-252. Awarded the Albert W. Fields Award for the best article in Renaissance studies published in 2003.
• ‘Britons Abroad: Travellers and Traders in Maghrebian Ports, 1580-1720,' in Abdeljelil Temimi and Mohamed-Salah Omri, eds., The Movement of People and Ideas between Britain and the Maghreb (Tunis: Fondation Temimi, 2003): 117-124.
• Recent reviews in TLS, International Journal of Turkish Studies, Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Journal of British Studies, English Historical Review