David K. Anderson is an Associate Professor in the OU Department of Classics and Letters. Since 2018 he has been the Senior Fellow of Dunham College, one of OU’s residential colleges.
Prof. Anderson studies the poetry and drama of the English Renaissance and the relationship between literature and religion. He is particularly interested in William Shakespeare, John Milton, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, John Foxe, and George Herbert, as well as Reformation history, the Western theological tradition, and the work of René Girard. His first book is entitled Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England: Tragedy, Religion, and Violence on Stage and was published by Ashgate Press in 2014. It considers how the sixteenth-century cultural crisis surrounding religious violence is reflected in the tragedy of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He has published articles on John Donne (Renaissance and Reformation), King Lear (ELH), Marlowe (Texas Studies in Literature and Language), Shakespearean suicide (Essays in Criticism), The Duchess of Malfi (Scene Focus) and political theology and As You Like It (Reformation).
Prof. Anderson’s next project is entitled Shakespeare at the Still Point. It will argue for the centrality of Christian neighbour-love (agape) to Shakespeare’s drama. Beyond that, he is interested in the shifting, overlapping, and contradictory conceptualizations of freedom in the early modern period and also in Milton’s political theology and his place in the Protestant theological tradition.
A native of Ontario, Canada, Prof. Anderson has a B.A. (Hon) from Queen’s University (Kingston), an M.A. from Dalhousie University (Halifax), and a Ph.D. from McGill University (Montreal). He has previously taught courses at McGill, Trinity College (at the University of Toronto), and Ryerson University.
Visit Professor Anderson’s Professing Literature podcast.
