Dr. Jan Purnis

Associate Professor of English
BA Hons (Guelph), MA, PhD (Toronto)

jan.purnis@uregina.ca
Phone: 306.586.4242 ext. 261 | Office: CM 512

Research Interests

• Renaissance Literature
• Representations of Digestion
• The Body-Mind Relationship
• Theories of Emotion
• Colonialism
• Gender
• Depictions of Cannibalism
• The Resurrection of the Body

Representative Publications

• “The ‘imagination of eating’: The Role of the Imagination in Appetite Stimulation and Suppression” in Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). Edited by Grant Williams and Mark Kaethler.
• “Sanctorius’s Weighing Chair: Measurement, Metabolism, and Mind” in The Quantification of Life and Health from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century: Intersections of Medicine and Philosophy, Palgrave Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Edited by Simone Guidi and Joaquim Braga.
• “Renaissance Discourses of Emotions” in Emotions, Community, and Citizenship: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, (University of Toronto Press, 2017). Edited by Rebecca Kingston, Kiran Banerjee, James McKee, Yi-Chun Chien, and Constantine C. Vassiliou.
• “Bodies and Selves: Autoscopy, Out-of-Body Experiences, Mind-Wandering, and Early Modern Consciousness” in Shakespeare and Consciousness, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Edited by Paul Budra and Clifford Werier.
• “The Belly-Mind Relationship in Early Modern Culture: Digestion, Ventriloquism, and the Second Brain” in Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind, (Routledge, 2014). Edited by Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble.
• “The Gendered Stomach in The Taming of the Shrew” in Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives, 1500-1700, (Palgrave, 2010). Edited by David Wootton and Graham Holderness.
• “The Stomach and Early Modern Emotion” in University of Toronto Quarterly 79.2 (Spring 2010).

Representative Awards

• A Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grant for my project “Cannibals Incorporated: Cannibalism, Digestion, and Early Modern Literature” (2013-2016)
• The Clifford Leech Dissertation Prize for 2009-2010 (awarded by the University of Toronto Department of English and the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama)