Amy Boesky

Amy Boesky is Professor of English at Boston College, where she teaches literature and creative nonfiction writing. Currently director of the English Department Honors Program., she is working with a group of faculty to set up a new minor in Medical Humanities at Boston College. Originally from the Detroit area, Amy has studied and taught in Oxford, England, Washington, D.C., and in the Boston area. At BC she teaches a number of subjects, from Milton and 17th century British life-writing to contemporary constructions of illness and the body. Her publications on seventeenth century British literature include, Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England, (University of Georgia Press, 1996), and articles on topics such as technologies of timekeeping, early modern museums, Milton and sunspots, Milton’s heaven as dystopia, and the connections between elegy, mourning and memory. She has published short-form creative nonfiction in The Michigan Quarterly Review, Memoir (and), Gulf Coast, and Kenyon Review Online. In addition to creative nonfiction, Amy’s current research interests focus on previvor discourses, genetic identity, and new forms of self- representation. Author of What We Have (Gotham Books, 2010), a memoir about her family’s experience with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, Amy is editor of a collection of essays on genetics and identity (The Story Within: Personal Essays on Genetics and Identity) forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press, September, 2013. She is beginning a new project on genetic identity and genetic memoir, one chapter of which will focus on BRCA narratives. A.B., Harvard College M.Phil. in Renaissance English, University of Oxford Ph.D., Harvard University