Mihoko Suzuki, Professor of English and Cooper Fellow in the Humanities, Emerita, served ten years as the Founding Director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Miami. She earned her AB in an interdisciplinary major, History and Literature, in the College Scholar Program at Cornell University, and her PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale University.
Her scholarship focuses on Renaissance and early modern literature and culture, English and European, with an emphasis on gender, politics, and authorship. She has also published on the classical tradition and the relationship between Japan and Western Europe during the early modern period. Her authored books include: Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic which examines Helen of Troy as a figure of difference for literary and political authority in classical and Renaissance epic (awarded a book prize from Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly); and Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588-1688 which argues for the importance of the contribution of women and non-aristocratic men to the political conversation leading up to, during, and after the tumultuous years of the English Revolution. In addition, she has edited or coedited essay collections, mostly on gender in the early modern period (Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500-1700; The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe; volume 3 of the 10-volume Palgrave History of British Women’s Writing (1610-90), but also on contemporary feminist criticism and theory (Diversifying the Discourse). She has also edited the writings of and about Mary Carleton and Elizabeth Cellier, notable (and notorious) women writers in seventeenth-century England, as well as coedited a 4-volume collection of printed and manuscript texts, Women’s Political Writings, 1610–1725. She has most recently edited Katherine Philips’s Pompey for Restoration Women’s Drama, 1662–1677. She has also served as section editor for the Caroline period for The Palgrave Encyclopedia for Early Modern Women’s Writing and currently serves on the editorial board of The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Gender and Women’s History and The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe.
She has published articles in Classical and Modern Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Études Epistémè, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Literature Compass, The Seventeenth Century, Theatre Journal, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, and Women's Writing, among others, and in essay collections, such as A History of Early Modern Women's Writing; The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Theory; A Cultural History of Education in the Renaissance (1450–1650); Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe; A Companion to the Global Renaissance; Historicizing Life Writing and Ego-Documents in Early Modern Europe; Margaret Cavendish: An Interdisciplinary Perspective; The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540–1680; and Women and Their Worlds: The Perspectives of Early Modern European Travellers.
Her most recent book, Antigone’s Example: Early Modern Women's Political Writings in Times of Civil War from Christine de Pizan to Helen Maria Williams, aims to revise the history of political thought, which has heretofore focused almost exclusively on formal treatises written by such thinkers as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke, by examining the works of early modern women writing in various genres. To this end, she examines women’s political writings during the seventeenth-century civil wars in England (1640-1660) and France (1648-53), but also extending backward to civil war contexts in the early fifteenth century and forward to the aftermath of the French Revolution in the early nineteenth century. She was awarded research fellowships for this project from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the New York Public Library; during fall 2016, she presented three public lectures drawn from this project at Smith College as Ruth and Clarence Kennedy Professor of Renaissance Studies. Antigone’s Example was awarded the 2023 Scholarly Monograph Award by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender.
Her current book projects concern early modern women writers and epic; and women’s manuscript writings as political discourse, for which she has been awarded the Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship from the Renaissance Society of America, the David Walker Memorial Fellowship in Early Modern History from the Bodleian Library, and the Charles Montgomery Gray Fellowship from the Newberry Library.
Suzuki coedited, along with her University of Miami colleagues, Anne J. Cruz and Mary Lindemann, six volumes of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2011-17), which was awarded the 2013 Voyager Award (for excellence in a journal covering the period 1500–1800) from the MLA Council of Editors of Learned Journals. With Ann Rosalind Jones and Jyotsna Singh, she coedited Transculturalisms, 1400–1700, a book series for Ashgate/Routledge, which published 29 titles. The series, moved to Palgrave Macmillan as New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800, published 12 titles. Its most recent iteration, Global Transculturalisms, 1400–1900, is published by Manchester University Press. She served for many years as review editor for Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History.
She has been an active member of various professional organizations, serving as President of the interdisciplinary Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender (which awarded her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2025) and the International Margaret Cavendish Society (from which she received the 2017 Sylvia Bowerbank Award), and as member of the Executive Council of the Sixteenth Century Studies Society and the International Spenser Society. For the Modern Language Association, she currently serves on the Executive Council, its governing board. She previously served on the Advisory Committee of the association’s journal, PMLA, and as Chair of the selection committees for the William Riley Parker Prize (for the best article in PMLA) and the MLA First Book Prize; she also served on the Executive Committee of the Forums on Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Classical and Modern Literature, as well as the President of the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages. For the Renaissance Society of America she served as the Discipline Representative for Women and Gender and as one of the articles coeditors of Renaissance Quarterly.
To view selected articles by Mihoko Suzuki, please access her scholarship here: scholarship.miami.edu
