Amy Boesky is an American author and a professor of English at Boston College

Boston College

Boston College is a private Jesuit research university located in the village of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA. The main campus is bisected by the border between the cities of Boston and Newton. It has 9,200 full-time undergraduates and 4,000 graduate students. Its name reflects its early...

.

Life

Amy Boesky is an Associate Professor of English at Boston College, where she teaches English literature and creative nonfiction writing.

She has been teaching and researching on the history of adolescent fiction and 17th-century English literature and culture, including the history of timepieces and temporal forms. She has written and published widely in this area, from a scholarly book on Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

 utopias to articles on gifts of timepieces to Queen Elizabeth

Elizabeth I of England

Elizabeth I was queen regnant of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. Sometimes called The Virgin Queen, Gloriana, or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth was the fifth and last monarch of the Tudor dynasty...

. She has also published articles on early modern literature and culture on topics such as technologies of timekeeping; early modern museums; Milton

John Milton

John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...

 and sunspots; Milton’s heaven as dystopia

Dystopia

A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...

; and elegy

Elegy

In literature, an elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead.-History:The Greek term elegeia originally referred to any verse written in elegiac couplets and covering a wide range of subject matter, including epitaphs for tombs...

, mourning and memory in journals such as ELH, Modern Philology

Modern Philology

Modern Philology is a literary journal that was established in 1903. It publishes scholarly articles on literature, literary scholarship, history, and criticism in all modern world languages and book reviews of recent books as well as review articles and research on archival documents. It is...

, Milton Studies, and SEL.

On adolescent fiction, Amy has published an article on Nancy Drew

Nancy Drew

Nancy Drew is a fictional young amateur detective in various mystery series for all ages. She was created by Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate book packaging firm. The character first appeared in 1930. The books have been ghostwritten by a number of authors and are published...

 in Studies in the Novel. She has written books for children and young adults—she wrote a book in verse for children, Planet Was (1990), several of the titles in the Beacon Street Girls

Beacon Street Girls

The Beacon Street Girls is a book series by Annie Bryant. The series, which is published by B*tween Productions, Inc., is designed for girls aged 9–14, and typically produced following consultations with various specialists in issues for girls...

’ series, and for several years was one of the principal ghostwriters for the bestselling Sweet Valley High

Sweet Valley High

Sweet Valley High is a novel series created by Francine Pascal, who presided over a team of ghostwriters for the duration of the series' creation. The series began in 1983 and ceased publication twenty years later with over 152 books to its name...

 series. What We Have is her first book of creative nonfiction.

Formerly from the Detroit area, Amy has studied and worked in various locations, including Oxford

Oxford

The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

; Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

, and the Boston

Boston

Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

 area, where she has lived since 1992. She now lives in Chestnut Hill

Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts

Chestnut Hill is a wealthy New England village located six miles west of downtown Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Like all Massachusetts villages, Chestnut Hill is not an incorporated municipal entity, but unlike most of them, it encompasses parts of three separate municipalities, each of...

with her husband, Jacques, and her two daughters, Sacha and Libby.

Works

• Autobiography -- What We Have, Amy Boesky, Gotham; First Edition (August 5, 2010), ISBN 978-1592405510

• Newspaper commentary -- Genetic testing questions, Amy Boesky, Boston Globe. Boston, Mass., Section: Opinion: Jul 9, 2010. p. A.13, ISSN: 07431791

Other works are

• Solving the Crime of Modernity: Nancy Drew in 1930, Amy Boesky, Studies in the Novel Spring 2010 42(1/2) 185

• Milton and the New World in Milton in Context, Amy Boesky, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski, Cambridge Univ Press, 2010

• Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance, Amy Boesky, Renaissance Quarterly Summer 2005 58(2) 727

• Aspects of Subjectivity: Society and Individuality from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton', Amy Boesky, Renaissance Quarterly Fall 2004 57(3) 1150

• Drama and Politics in the English Civil War, Amy Boesky, Renaissance Quarterly Summer 2000 53(2) 608

• Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History, Amy Boesky, Modern Philology Aug 2000 98(1) 32

• Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Amy Boesky, Ed., with Mary Thomas Crane, 2000

• Double time: Women, Watches, and the Gift of Eternity, The Double Voice: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, Amy Boesky, 2000

• The Maternal Shape of Mourning: A Reconsideration of "Lycidas, Amy Boesky, Modern Philology May 1998 95(4) 463

• Milton, Galileo and Sunspots: Optics and Certainty in Paradise Lost, Amy Boesky, Milton Studies, Vol. 34, Winter 1997, 23-42.

• Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great Southern Land, Amy Boesky, Renaissance Quarterly Summer 1997 50(2) 581

• The Rest Is Silence, Amy Boesky, JEGP. Journal of English and Germanic Philology Jan 1997 96(1) 122

• Milton's heaven and the model of the English utopia, Amy Boesky, Studies in English Literature, 1500 - 1900 Winter 1996 36(1) 91

• Nation, miscegenation: Membering utopia in Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines, Amy Boesky, Texas Studies in Literature and Language Summer 1995 37(2) 165

• Reviews -- An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest by Jeffrey Knapp, Amy Boesky, Renaissance Quarterly Spring 1995 48(1) 168

• "Outlandish-Fruits": Commissioning Nature for the Museum of Man, Amy Boesky, ELH Summer 1991 58(2) 305

• Fiction -- Planet Was, Amy Boeskyand illustrated by Nadine Bernard Westcott, School Library Journal Jan 1991 37(1) 68

Book Reviews

• Love Conquers (Almost) All.: What We Have, O, The Oprah Magazine August 2010, v11 i8, p148(1), Nelson, Liza, ISSN: 1531-3247