Brent Nelson is principal investigator of The Culture of Curiosity in England and Scotland 1580-1700 and is building a virtual museum of collections of curiosities related to this context. His new SSHRC-funded project, "The Social Network of Early Modern Collectors of Curiosities," with Co-Investigator Craig Harkema, is the next stage of this work and will use this data set to track the movement of curious objects between the various agents involved in their collection, display, and observation.  He is also  past president of the John Donne Society and director if its Digital Prose Project. He is a collaborator on INKE: Implementing New Knowledge Environments (inke.ca) and GEMMS: Gateway to English Manuscript Sermons (https://gemms.itercommunity.org/).

Graduate Supervision:

Kyle Dase. “The Social Network of John Donne's Verse Letters.” Ph.D. (current).

Joel Salt. "Squaring the Circle: Material Space in the Writings of John Donne and John Milton." Ph.D. (current).

Emily Pickett, “'I Dare Do All That May Become a Man': Establishing a Textual Case for an All-female Macbeth.” M. A. (current).

Dara Gerbrandt. “Demeaning Disguise: Male Cross-Dressing in Early Modern Drama.” M. A. (current).

Robert Imes. "Writing Geography: Early Modern English Chorographies." Ph.D. (2020).

Ryan Gayowski. "She erected schools, and founded several societies”: Reimagining Margaret Cavendish’s Visit to The Royal Society.” M. A. (2020).

Rebekah Bennetch, M.A.  "The Gospel According to Glamour: A Rhetorical Analysis of Revolve: the Complete New Testament" (2008).

Jonathan Goossen, M.A. "Priestly Kings: The Involvement of Shakespeare's Sovereigns in the Private Lives of their Subjects" (2006).

Elizabeth Wightman, M.A. "Shakespeare's Deconstruction of Exempla in Troilus and Cressida" (2005).

Books and edited collections:

Brent Nelson. Editor and introduction. “500 Years of Utopia,” a special issue of Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme. 41.3 (2018): 7-15.

Brent Nelson and Richard Cunningham, eds., 2017. Beyond Accessibility: Textual Studies in the Twenty-First Century. Digital Studies. https://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/issue/view/49

Brent Nelson and Melissa Terras, eds and intro, 2012. Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture. New Technologies in Renaissance Studies. Toronto: Iter; Tempe, AZ: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 

Brent Nelson, 2009, editor and introduction. "Bridging Communities," a special issue of Digital Studies / Le champ numerique. 1.3. http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/issue/view/21

Brent Nelson, editor (of 5 essays) and introduction, 2008.  “Reassembling the Disassembled Book.” Computing in the Humanities Working Papers Vol. A.41-46. http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/issue/view/12

Brent Nelson, 2005.  Holy Ambition: Rhetoric, Courtship, and Devotion in the Sermons of John Donne.  Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 284.  Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies at Arizona State University, 306 pages.

Brent Nelson, assistant ed. and John S. North, ed., 2003.  The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals 1800-1900, Series Two (On-line).  Waterloo, ON: North Waterloo Academic Press.  www.victorianperiodicals.com

Book Chapters:

Accepted, Brent Nelson and Peter Robinson, forthcoming. “Curricular Contexts for Real World Research in Textual Studies.” In Digital Pedagogy and Early Modern Material Textual Studies. New Technologies in Renaissance Studies.  Eds. Scott Schofield and Andie Silva. Toronto: Iter; Tempe, AZ: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 

Brent Nelson, 2017. "The Textual Habitat: The Development of New Knowledge Environments." In Beyond Accessibility: Textual Studies in the Twenty-First Century.  Eds. Brent Nelson and Richard Cunninghan. Digital Studies. https://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/article/view/357

Brent Nelson, 2012. “‘Pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts’: Inferring Pronuntiatio and Actio from the Text of John Donne’s Second Prebend Sermon.” In Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written and Visual. Eds. Susan Gingell and Wendy Roy. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP.

Alan Galey, Richard Cunningham, Brent Nelson, Ray Siemens, Paul Werstine, and the INKE team, forthcoming.  “Beyond Remediation: The Role of Textual Studies in Implementing New Knowledge Environments.” In Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture. Eds. Brent Nelson and Melissa Terras. Toronto: Iter; Tempe, AZ: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Brent Nelson, 2008. “Curious Readers and Meditative Form in Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia.”  In ‘A man very well studyed’: Thomas Browne in Context. Eds. Richard Todd and Kathryn Murphy.  Leiden: E. J. Brill. 107-26.

Brent Nelson, 2008.“The Browne Family’s Culture of Curiosity.” In The World Proposed: Essays on Thomas Browne. Eds. Reid Barbour and Claire Preston.  Oxford: Oxford University Press. 80-99.

Brent Nelson, 2003.  “Pathopoeia and the Protestant Form of Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.”  In John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives. Ed. Mary Arshagouni Papazian. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. 247-72.  

Journal Articles:

Brent Nelson, forthcoming. “Was John Donne Curious?” The John Donne Journal. 

Brent Nelson, 2019. “Translating the Cabinet of Curiosities in Early Modern England.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 46.2: 336–52. https://doi.org/10.1353/crc.2019.0025.

Brent Nelson, 2019. “The Social Digital Archive,” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies. 3.1 DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/kula.12

Brent Nelson, 2016. “Faith and Sheep’s Guts in Much Ado About Nothing.” Shakespeare 12.2: 161-74. 10.1080/17450918.2014.968607

Brent Nelson, 2016, “Curating Object-Oriented Collections Using the TEI,” Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative 9 (2016): 1-24. https://journals.openedition.org/jtei/1680  

Susan Brown, Linda Cameron, Anita Cutic, Mihaela Ilovan, Olga Ivanova, Ruth Knechtel, Andrew MacDonald, Brent Nelson, Stan Ruecker, Stéfan Sinclair and members of the INKE Research Group. “A Experiment in Hybrid Open-Access Online Scholarly Publishing: Regenerations,” Scholarly and Research Communication. http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/261

Brent Nelson, 2015. “The Museum as Knowledge Environment.” Scholarly and Research Communication 6.4. 1-15. http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/issue/view/21

Brent Nelson, 2014. “Investigative Tagging: Modelling the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities.” Digital Studies / Le champ numérique 4. http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/article/view/257/318

Brent Nelson, Robert Imes, and Jon Bath, 2014. “Small Books, Small Screens: From the Phylactery to the Cellphone.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 51.2 (Winter): 221-42. 

Brent Nelson, 2013. “Radiant Donne: A Case for the Digital Archive and the John Donne’s Society’s Digital Prose Project.” John Donne Journal  33: 175-200. 

Craig Harkema and Brent Nelson, 2013. “Scholar-Librarian Collaboration in the Publication of Scholarly Materials.” Collaborative Librarianship 5.3: 197-207. http://collaborativelibrarianship.org/index.php/jocl/article/view/243/206

Brent Nelson, 2013. “The Table of Contents.” ArchBook: Architectures of the Book. http://archbook.ischool.utoronto.ca/archbook/tableofcontents.php

Brent Nelson and Jon Bath, 2012.  "Old Ways for Linking Texts in the Digital Reading Environment: The Case of the Thompson Chain Reference Bible." Digital Humanities Quarterly (6.2). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/2/000137/000137.html 

Brent Nelson, Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, Stéfan Sinclair, Susan Brown, Mark Bieber, and the INKE team, forthcoming. “A Short History and Demonstration of the Dynamic Table of Contents.”  Scholarly Research Communication.

Alan Galey, Richard Cunningham, Brent Nelson, Ray Siemen, Paul Werstine, 2012. “Beyond Remediation: The Role of Textual Studies in Implementing New Knowledge Environments.” Scholarly and Research Communication 3.1.  http://www.src-online.ca/index.php/src

Brent Nelson, 2009. “Cain-Leviathan Typology in Gollum and Grendel.” Extrapolation 50.3 (Winter 2009)

Brent Nelson, 2003. “Courtship and the Hill of Truth: Religion, Career, and the Purification of Motives in Donne's Satyres and Sermons.” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 27.4 (Autumn): 5-29.

Other Refereed Publications:

Brent Nelson, 2003.  “The Social Context of Rhetoric, 1500-1660.”  In British Rhetoricians and Logicians 1500-1660, second series. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ed. Edward Malone. Columbia, SC:  Bruccoli, Clark, Layman, Inc. 355-77.

Brent Nelson, 2003.  “John Hoskyns.”  In British Rhetoricians and Logicians 1500-1660, second series. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ed. Edward Malone. Columbia, SC:  Bruccoli, Clark, Layman, Inc.. 154-66.

Brent Nelson, 2001.  “Roger Ascham.” In British Rhetoricians and Logicians 1500-1660, first series. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ed. Edward Malone. Columbia, SC:  Bruccoli, Clark, Layman, Inc.

Non-referred Publications:

Brent Nelson, 2004. “Edmund Spenser.” In Dictionary of British Classicists, 1500-1960. Ed. Edward Malone. Bristol, Engl.: Thoemmes Press.

Brent Nelson, 2004. “Roger Ascham.” In Dictionary of British Classicists, 1500-1960. Ed. Edward Malone. Bristol, Engl.: Thoemmes Press.

John Donne Renaissance book history cabinets of curiosities cultural history digital digital humanities early modern literature

Brent Nelson is principal investigator of The Culture of Curiosity in England and Scotland 1580-1700 and is building a virtual museum of collections of curiosities related to this context. His new SSHRC-funded project, "The Social Network of Early Modern Collectors of Curiosities," with Co-Investigator Craig Harkema, is the next stage of this work and will use this data set to track the movement of curious objects between the various agents involved in their collection, display, and observation.  He is also  past president of the John Donne Society and director if its Digital Prose Project.