Office Hours
On Research Leave
Education
PhD, Florida State University
About Me
Deborah Solomon spent the first eighteen years of her life in The Gambia, West Africa, after which she moved to the U.S. to further her education. She traces her deep fascination with language - in all its beauty, versatility, and intriguing deficiency - to those early years of multi-cultural and multi-lingual engagement. In 2015, she received her PhD from Florida State University, where she specialized in early modern poetry and the history of text technologies.
Her current research focuses on what early modern print conventions can tell us about the reading practices of the period, specifically the way familiar material was compared, adapted, and altered for new contexts. Her latest book project, tentatively titled Creative Continuations: Adaptive Practices in Early Modern England, examines the extension of fictional worlds, the animation of abstract concepts, and the serial lives of literary figures in order to demonstrate the range of adaptive strategies through which writers personalized their literary heritage. A related research project explores frontispiece explication poems, a surprisingly overlooked genre of seventeenth-century poetry that prompted readers to interpret both the visual and textual features of printed books. Together, these projects reveal how early modern texts cultivated readerly engagement, interpretive flexibility, and comparative reading habits.
Underlying all her work is an interest in how meaning changes as it moves across different media, languages, and cultural contexts. In her first book, The Poem and the Garden: Rival Media in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2023), she draws attention to the aesthetic interchange between Elizabethan poetry and garden art in order to illustrate the benefits of a trans-media approach to the literary culture of the period. In 2016, this project received a year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, during which time she traveled to the UK to conduct archival work and visit the garden reconstructions at Hampton Court, Holdenby, Lyveden, Kenilworth, and Bolsover.
Her teaching centers on the relationship between literary texts and their material and cultural contexts. Recent graduate seminars have explored Elizabethan prose fiction, genre innovation, and the pastoral tradition, while undergraduate courses have examined subjects ranging from the University Wits of Elizabethan London to Environmental Literature. Whenever possible, she integrates resources and expertise from Auburn University's Special Collections Library, inviting students to explore the history of reading, printing, and literary interpretation through hands-on engagement with rare books and archival materials.
Research Interests
early modern British literature; book history; early material culture; textual studies; ecocriticism and environmental humanities; genre studies; poetry
Publications
The Poem and the Garden in Early Modern England: Rival Media in the Process of Poetic Invention (Routledge, 2022). ISBN 9781032188805. NEH funded.
“The Garden Context of Gabriel Harvey’s ‘Encomium Lauri’,” Spenser Studies 38.1 (2024): 43-72. DOI: 10.1086/728166
“Walking the Commonplaces of Paradise: Pastoral Precursors in Milton’s Garden of Eden.” The Seventeenth Century, 35.6 (2020): 773-798. DOI: 10.1080/0268117X.2019.1627904
“‘All in a Garden Green’: Shakespeare’s Staging of Garden Imagery.” The Ben Jonson Journal 26.2 (2019): 227–252. DOI: 10.3366/bjj.2019.0256
“Representations of Lyric Intimacy in Manuscript and Print Versions of Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’” Modern Philology 111.4 (2014): 668-682. DOI: 10.1086/674918
Courses Taught
ENGL 7850: Studies in Genre
ENGL 7160: Early Modern Studies
ENGL 4800: Seminar in Literature
ENGL 4620: Milton
ENGL 4310: Renaissance English Literature
ENGL 2230: British Literature Before 1789
ENGL 2020: Introduction to Literary Studies