Trevor, Douglas

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Trevor, Douglas

(Doug Trevor)

PERSONAL: Married; children: two. Education: Princeton University, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1992; Université de Tours, France, Lettres Modernes, Licence, 1993; Harvard University, M.A., 1995, Ph.D., 1999.

ADDRESSES: Home—Iowa City, IA. Office—Department of English, University of Iowa, 308 English-Philosophy Bldg., Iowa City, IA 52242-1492. E-mail—Douglas-Trevor@uiowa.edu.

CAREER: Educator and author. University of Iowa, Iowa City, associate professor of English, faculty advisor to the general education program, 1999–2002, associate chair for undergraduate programs, 2005–, chair of the Undergraduate Steering Committee, 2005–. Has served as a member of various university committees.

MEMBER: Renaissance Society of America, Modern Language Association, Milton Society, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Francis LeMoyne Page Senior Thesis Award, Princeton University, 1992; graduate fellowship for study abroad, Rotary Foundation, 1992–93; research grants, Harvard Graduate Student Council, 1994, 1997; distinction in teaching, Harvard University, 1995, 1996; Chris O'Malley Prize in Short Fiction, University of Wisconsin, 1996, for "The Whores in Tours" (short story); doctoral summer research grant, Mellon Foundation, 1996; dissertation fellowship, Whiting Foundation, 1997–98; research grant, Newberry Library Consortium, 1999–2000; Old Gold Summer fellowship, University of Iowa, 2000, 2001; supplemental travel grants, University of Iowa, 2002, 2003; fellow, Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, University of Iowa, 2002; Sokolov Scholar in Fiction, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, 2003; arts and humanities initiative grant, University of Iowa, 2003–04; David R.W.M. Keck Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fellow, Huntington Library, 2004; Charles A. Ryskamp research fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 2004–05; John C. Gerber Teaching Prize, Department of English, University of Iowa, 2005; Iowa Short Fiction Award, 2005, for The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space; Dean's Scholarship, University of Iowa, 2005–06; O. Henry Prize, 2006, for "Girls I Know."

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Carla Mazzio) Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, Routledge (New York, NY), 2000.

The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2004.

The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space (short stories), University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 2005.

Contributor to numerous collections, including Reading the Early Modern Passions, edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004; The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 (anthology); and Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets, edited by Michael Schoenfeldt, Blackwell Press, 2006. Contributor of short stories to literary journals, including the Paris Review, Glimmer Train, New England Review, and Epoch. Contributor of articles to journals and periodicals, including the Sixteenth Century Journal, Modern Language Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, and Boston Book Review. Served as fiction editor of the Iowa Review, 2000–04. Also serves as editorial advisor for Shakespeare Yearbook and a reviewer for Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, Philological Quarterly, and Clio.

SIDELIGHTS: Specializing in Renaissance literature, English professor Douglas Trevor has published a multitude of fiction and nonfiction works in periodicals, anthologies, and other collections. Trevor edited his first book, Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, with Carla Mazzio. Part of the "Culture Work" series, the volume collects sixteen academic essays that attempt to determine whether people in early modern Europe understood the idea of "an inner self." In addition to Trevor and Mazzio, contributors include Anna Rosalin Jones, Peter Stally-brass, James R. Siemon, John Guillory, Eric Wilson, and Karen Newman, among others. Reviewer E. James Lieberman in Library Journal observed that the contributors to this work "write heady stuff" but went on to comment that readers "who enjoy brilliant speculation on rarefied ideas will be rewarded."

Following Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, Trevor produced The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England, which discusses the works of Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Robert Burton, and John Milton, and The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, a collection of short stories that earned the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Each protagonist in the collection attempts to deal with a loss, or "tear," in his or her life, such as the death of a loved one or self-annihilation. For example, in "Central Square," an alcoholic man spends time with a young Chilean woman who operates a coffee cart at the mall and helps awaken him to the reality that he is drinking himself to death. In "The Surprising Weight of the Body's Organs," a mother struggles to cope with her young son's death. In a critique of the collection for Kirkus Reviews, one contributor explained that the stories "trace the various facets of human loneliness" and are "about the difficulty of communicating in the face of loss." The contributor concluded by defining the stories in The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space as "taut and rich." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly observed that "Trevor's writing has energy and his characters have authentic quirks."