25 September 2007

`Romance’ - A conference in honour of Victor Skretkowicz

International experts in Renaissance literature will gather at the University of Dundee next month in honour of Dr Victor Skretkowicz, who is set to retire at the end of October.

Dr Skretkowicz is a Senior Lecturer in the English department at Dundee, where he has taught for almost thirty years. He was diagnosed around two years ago as suffering from Motor Neurone Disease.

To mark his many achievements, colleagues in the English department have organised an international conference which will be staged at the University on October 5th and 6th. `Romance’ will see experts coming to Dundee from the USA, Germany and around the UK to give presentations in the field of early modern romance and Renaissance literature.

"It is a measure of the respect in which Victor is held that we have people coming from around the world for this conference," said Professor Peter Kitson, one of Victor’s colleagues at Dundee who has helped organise the event.

"His contributions to this particular field of literature have been immense and it is only right that he should be honoured in this way."

Dr Skretkowicz will attend the conference, where presentations will be made to him by the International Sidney Society and by the University.

The `Romance’ conference takes place in the new teaching block at the University of Dundee on October 5th and 6th. For further information on the conference contact c.murray@dundee.ac.uk

ABOUT DR VICTOR SKRETKOWICZ
Victor received his BA from McMaster University, his MA from New Brunswick and his PhD from Southampton, where he was also a research fellow, prior to coming to Dundee.

He has published widely and is an international authority on the subject of early modern romance and Renaissance literature generally. His specialist research interests include: the work of the Sidney family, Shakespeare, Marlowe and their contemporaries; the politics and cultural interpretations of rhetoric; and Erotic Romance. Victor was awarded the Jean Robertson Lifetime Achievement award by the International Sidney Society in May 2007

Victor also has many wide-ranging teaching and research interests from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, to William Blake. He recently taught an innovative module on Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code and the myth of the Templars and the Holy Grail postgraduate students on the English MLitt, Writing Culture.

Victor is the editor of the major critical edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia) for Oxford English Texts (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987). He was also the Research Director of the electronic Dictionary of the Scots Language (http://www.dsl.ac.uk) (Dundee: University of Dundee, 2004). He also edited the standard edition of Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing for the Royal College of Nursing in 1992. His latest book, Erotic Romance, concerns the political implications of classical rhetoric on Shakespeare and other writers.

Motor Neurone Disease (MND) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that attacks the upper and lower motor neurones. Degeneration of the motor neurones leads to weakness and wasting of muscles, causing increasing loss of mobility in the limbs, and difficulties with speech, swallowing and breathing.

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