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; the story collection from ancient India to modern England in English and Comparative Literary Studies; and in the Kaplan Humanities Scholars program. 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, more recently, articles or chapters on the authority of the actor’s voice (Shakespearean International Yearbook, forthcoming), replaying early modern drama, the Wooster Group, and Hamlet (in New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies, 2010), humanism and the resistance to theology (in The Return of Theory in Early Modern Studies, 2010), conversation and the theory of knowledge in Thomas Browne (in Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed, 2009), and real and represented confusions on the Elizabethan stage (Theatre Journal, 2008). He will be editing Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica with Kevin Killeen and Jessica Wolfe for the new Oxford University Press edition of Browne’s Complete Works. 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). He is currently at work on a book called Understanding and Confusion in the Elizabethan Theaters and on a project reconsidering the Renaissance philology of Angelo Poliziano.
Publications by William N. West
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
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The English Major in Writing Celebrates 30 Years on campus
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Jo Ann Beard, Frank Bidart, and George Saunders were Writers in Residence for the English Major in Writing’s 3rd Annual Spring Writers’ Festival
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Creative Writing students congregate at the 3rd Annual Spring Writer’s Festival
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English Department faculty attend one of the talks organized as part of the annual One Book, One Northwestern program
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Writing students Cathy Gao (left) and Alleliah Nuguid (right) meet writer Elizabeth Benedict (center) at the Skidmore Summer Writers’ Institute.
Photo provided by Cathy Gao.
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Northwestern writing students Matt Pacult, Cathy Gao, and Alleliah Nuguid meet poet Frank Bidart at the Skidmore Summer Writers’ Institute.
Photo provided by Cathy Gao.
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Professors Mary Kinzie and John Keene celebrate 30 Years of creative writing at Northwestern
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Professors Wendy Wall (Avalon Foundation Professor, left) and Reginald Gibbons (Frances Hooper Chair in the Arts and Humanities, right) at their inauguration, with Professor Christopher Herbert
