Welcome to the website of Mary Nyquist, semi-retired Professor in the Centre for Comparative Literature, the Programme in Literature and Critical Theory, and the Department of English at the University of Toronto.

My research interests have expanded and evolved over the years but have not radically changed. The research I have done engages primarily with Early Modern Western European literature as it intersects with European settler colonialism, Atlantic slavery, Amer-Indigeneity, and political philosophy. Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Milton are the major authors on whom I have most published, though I have always studied their works alongside those of lesser known contemporaries together, often, with relevant visual materials. Another area of interest is the literature of revolution produced in mid-seventeenth century England as well as later in the Age of Revolutions. Nearly all my research and writing is centred on large, important questions with significant implications for the present that are addressed by means of close rhetorical, semantic, and syntactic analyses of difficult or problematical passages. My fascination with language, which began when I wrote poetry as a young adult, continues to inspire the poetry I have written in recent years.

My undergraduate degree is from the University of Minnesota, my M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto. My first academic position was in the Department of English at the University of Rochester, where Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and I started a Women’s Studies Cluster; in the ’80s I was the first Director of the Women’s Studies Programme at the University of Toronto (now the Institute of Women and Gender Studies). Visiting professorships have been held at Trent University and Brandeis University. Between my M.A. and Ph.D., I studied German at the University of Gottingen, and for decades have been improving my Latin and French.