Dennis Quinn is Professor of English, former chair of the Department of English and former chair of the Department of World Languages. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. As an undergraduate he majored in English and History and has studied Classics and Philosophy as well. He is a member of the Archaeological Institute of America, the Modern Language Association, Phi Alpha Theta International Society of Historians, and the Medieval Academy of America among other organizations.
Dr. Quinn’s specialties include classical languages and literature (Latin and Greek), Renaissance English Literature, and Shakespeare. He has also teaching interests in Milton, Irish Literature, Film and Literature, the Modern European Novel, and Young Adult Literature. His dissertation focused on the works of English Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser.
He is the author of a number of books, novels, and articles, among them Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Monomyth of Joseph Campbell (2001); the comic romances in the Winston University series of novels: Ever and Ever (2007); Restoration Court (2015); K (2017) Sex @ Work (2019); The Saurian Invasion (2021); and the dystopian fantasy Sojourn: Gates of Ivory, Gates of Horn (2010). He is presently at work on a translation from the Latin of Dares Phrygius’ De Excidio Troiae Historia and another comic novel The Bards of Broad and Brantley and a collection of science fiction short stories Aea Scapes.
Dr. Quinn came to education in the early 1980s after ten years as editor of academic journals and texts. He has worked for The University of Chicago Press, John Wiley and Sons, and Houghton Mifflin in a number of editorial capacities. He had his start in editing when fresh out of college proofreading and eventually copy-editing law reviews for Harvard, Yale, Boston University, the University of Chicago, and Fordham. He prefers teaching. And writing.
His favorite authors besides Shakespeare and Milton are Joseph Conrad and Thomas Mann, and his theme music, since everyone has to have some, is the Passa calle movement from Luigi Boccherini’s La Musica Notturna Delle Strade di Madrid (1780).