I came to Colby from Ithaca College, and to Ithaca from Davis, California where I developed an interest in maritime figures—like John Milton’s Satan who crosses chaos with wings like sails and washes up to assault Adam and Eve in Eden—during my graduate work. That interest spawned my first book, Gendered Seascapes and Monarchy in Early Modern English Culture, which examines gender, political power, and the maritime environment as represented in English cultural texts from the 16th and 17th centuries. I am developing a second project on the afterlives of the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis that will examine the entanglement of notions about race, gender, and monstrosity with notions about environments. I am pursuing a related interest in early modern protest literature, some of which expresses political rage and resistance through maritime metaphors and environments. I have published essays on Spenser, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Margaret Cavendish, Hester Pulter, and Chaucer. I teach courses in early modern literature and culture as well as topics-based courses on environments, natures, bodies (of water), performance, migration, islands and more; I ask students to examine the long histories of race, gender/sexuality, class, place, and ability-based prejudices through discussion of early modern texts.
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Dr. Dyani Johns Taff
Assistant Professor of English
Department of English, Colby College
