Professor Annabel Patterson

Distinguished scholar Annabel Patterson is the Sterling Professor Emerita of English at Yale University. An expert in early modern literature, her work also encompasses history, law and politics. She has written16 books and more than 70 articles on topics as varied as Holinshed’s Chronicles, 18th-century libel law, the reception of Virgil’s eclogues in Europe, editions of Aesop’s fables, censorship, liberalism and parliamentary history. Her writings also discuss Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, John Locke and Andrew Marvell.

Patterson has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship; a senior fellowship at the Society of Humanities, Cornell University; the Andrew Mellon Chair of the Humanities at Duke; a Mellon Fellowship, National Humanities Center; and a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship at Yale. She won the Harry Levin Comparative Literature Prize for Pastoral and Ideology, and the John Ben Snow Award for Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles. She is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto.