William N. West
Associate Professor in English
University Hall 419
Telephone: 847-467-1345
Fax: 847-467-1545
E-mail: w-west@northwestern.edu
Will West (Ph.D., University of Michigan) studies, teaches, and thinks about early modern drama, poetry, and prose. At Northwestern he has taught undergraduate classes on narratives of early contact between Europeans and Americans, 1492-1700; poetics and aesthetics from Aristotle to Kant; and epic in cross-cultural contexts in English and Comparative Literary Studies. In 2007 he was awarded a place on the ASG Faculty Honor Roll. He is a Fellow of the Humanities Residential College and Co-Director of the Drama Major. West is the author of Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge UP, 2002; pbk. 2006) and, most recently, articles or chapters on how to know when the jig is up in the Elizabethan theater (in Locating the Queen's Men, 1583-1603, Ashgate, 2009), what's the matter with Shakespeare (South Central Review, 2009), real and represented confusions on the Elizabethan stage (Theatre Journal, 2008), less well wrought urns (ELH, 2008), and Jacob Burckhardt's conception of history (MLQ, 2007). He co-edited (with Helen Higbee) Robert Weimann's book Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Writing and Playing in Shakespeare's Theatre (Cambridge UP, 2000) and (with Bryan Reynolds) a collection of essays honoring Weimann, Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern Stage (Palgrave, 2005).
With Jeffrey Masten, West is the co-editor of the journal Renaissance Drama (Northwestern University Press); most recently he completed a special double issue issue on the drama of Italy in Europe (n.s. 36/37, forthcoming 2010) with Albert Ascoli. He is currently at work on a book called Understanding and Confusion in the Elizabethan Theaters and on a project tracing the history of imagining the Renaissance.
Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe 
Author's Pen and Actor's Voice : Playing and Writing in Shakespeare's Theatre
Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage
