Travis D. Williams

Assistant Professor of English

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
M.Phil. University of Oxford
B.A. University of California, Berkeley

Office: 308E Swan Hall
Phone: 401-874-9501
Email: travisdw@gmail.com
Office Hours: Tues 4:00 - 5:00 pm , Tues and Thur 3:00 - 4:00 pm

Professor Williams studied English and mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley before starting graduate school at Oxford. There, he concentrated on medieval and Renaissance drama, completed a thesis called “Children in Shakespeare,” and received the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize for an essay on the English ballad. Returning to Berkeley, he earned a Ph.D. with a dissertation entitled “Ethos and Enargeia: Literary and Rhetorical Strategies of Early Modern Mathematics.”

Prior to arriving at the University of Rhode Island in 2006, Professor Williams earned the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award at the University of California, Berkeley, where his courses ranged across medieval and Renaissance literature, Shakespeare, science and literature, and the literary dystopia. His teaching at URI includes courses on Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and Chaucer, Renaissance lyric poetry, and science and literature.

Professor Williams concentrates his research in the areas of the literature and rhetoric of the British Renaissance, and the cultural history of science and mathematics. He is currently pursuing a project provisionally entitled Shakespeare’s Arithmetic: Literature, Rhetoric, and Early Modern Mathematics. He has recently presented papers at conferences of the Renaissance Society of America in San Francisco, of the History of Science Society in Vancouver, and on cultural studies in Aberdeen. He has recently held fellowships from the URI Council for Research, the URI Council for the Humanities, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.