Lynn Enterline is Nancy Perot Mulford Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. A life-long student of comparative literature, she researches and interprets the connections among the histories of rhetoric, sexuality, and emotion in the English, Italian, Latin, and Greek literary traditions. Her publications and courses  work through problems in 16th and 17th century British literature as understood in light of classical and continental antecedents as well as contemporary theory – in which case her most significant intellectual touchstones are psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, Marxist, and materialist speculation as well as recent work in affect theory. 

She has written three books: Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (2012); The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (2000); and The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (1995).  These focus, respectively, on melancholia, masculinity, and the challenges of poetic language from Tasso to Webster and Marvell; Ovid, the Ovidian tradition in Italy and England, and transgendered ventriloquism; Elizabethan grammar school practices, the movement from Latin rhetorical training to vernacular literary production, and cultural critique. 

She is currently working on Epic Discontent: on the Critical Potential of Passionate Character, a book about Elizabethan minor epics, masculinity, and specific rhetorical practices (like prosopopoeia or “impersonation”) that traversed all three of early modern England’s educational institutions: grammar school, university, and Inns of Court. Epic Discontent will explore two problems: what disrupted epic teleology and female “complaints” reveal about male forensic habits of mind; and why, in the 1590s, the figure of an eloquent “barbarian” became such a compelling site for cultural critique.