Anne Williams

Anne Williams is Professor of English Emeritus. She was a member of the department from 1978-2008. She specializes in British Romanticism and the Gothic tradition and has a strong interest in feminist literary theory. She served as English department head from 1996-2001. During her last years she taught a course in opera and literature, spurred by her discovery that Horace Walpole, first Gothic novelist, was an avid opera fan. She published two books with the University of Chicago Press:  Prophetic Strain:  The Greater Lyric in the Eighteenth Century (1984) and Art of Darkness:  A Poetics of Gothic (1995). She edited Three Vampire Tales:  The Vampyr, Carmilla, and Dracula for Houghton Mifflin in 2003 and co-edited with Christy Desmet, Shakespearean Gothic (University of Wales Press, 2009). Among her numerous articles on Romantic, Gothic, and operatic topics is a translation from French of the libretto of Charles Gounod’s 1854 opera La Nonne sanglante. She currently serves as the American Book Review Editor for Gothic Studies, and is completing a psychobiography of Horace Walpole, “’Monstrous Pleasures’:  Horace Walpole’s Gothic Operas.