Professor Margaret McGowan FBA

The Renaissance; interdisciplinary approaches to court literature and art; their political and cultural contexts; critical approaches to the History of the Dance and its printed, manuscript and visual sources

Elected 1993

Fellow type: UK Fellow
Year of birth: 1931
Year of death: 2022
Year elected: 1993
Sections: Early Modern Languages and Literatures to 1830

Professor McGowan studied at the University of Reading. She was at the University of Sussex from 1964, serving as Dean of the School of European Studies from 1977-1980; as Pro-Vice-Chancellor from 1981-1986 and 1989-92; and as Deputy Vice Chancellor from 1992-1998. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and President of the Early Dance Circle. In 2009, she won the Wolfson Prize for her book Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession. She was made a CBE in 1998.

Last post

Research Professor of French, University of Sussex

Past appointments

University of Sussex Professor of French

1974 - 1997

University of Sussex Reader

1968 - 1974

University of Sussex Lecturer

1964 - 1968

University of Glasgow Lecturer

1957 - 1964

Université de Strasbourg Lecturer

1955 - 1957

Publications

Dynastic Marriages: A Celebration of the Habsburg and Bourbon Unions

Margaret M. McGowan - Published in 2013 by Routledge

La Danse à la Renaissance: Sources Livresques et Albums d'Image

Margaret M. McGowan - Published in 2012 by Bibliotheque Nationale de France

Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession

Margaret M. McGowan - Published in 2008 by Yale University Press

The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France

Margaret M. McGowan - Published in 2000 by Yale University Press

The Court Ballet of Louis XIII

Margaret McGowan - Published in 1989 by Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Moy Qui Me Voy: The Writer and the Self from Montaigne to Leiris

Edited by Margaret M. McGowan and George Craig - Published in 1989 by Oxford University Press

Ideal Forms in the Age of Ronsard

Margaret M. McGowan - Published in 1985 by California University Press

Form and Meaning: Aesthetic Coherence in Seventeenth-Century French Drama

Edited by Margaret M. McGowan and Ian D. McFarlane - Published in 1982 by Avebury

Montaigne's Deceits: The Art of Persuasion in the Essais

Margaret M. McGowan - Published in 1974 by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

L'art du Ballet de Cour en France, 1581-1643

Margaret M. McGowan - Published in 1963 by Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Related Fellows

Professor Ingrid De Smet FBA

Renaissance and Early Modern intellectual culture, especially in France and the Low Countries; sixteenth and early-seventeenth century French literature; Neo-Latin Studies; the Republic of Letters; the Classical tradition

Professor Nico Mann FBA

Petrarch, early Italian Renaissance and the classical tradition

Professor Sir Jonathan Bate FBA

English Language and Literature

Sign up to our email newsletters