Dr. Stanwood has been a Professor of English at UBC since 1975, and Professor Emeritus since 1998. He has also taught at Tufts University (Boston), and the universities of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Cambridge, York (UK), and Würzburg (Germany).
A specialist in the Renaissance and in seventeenth-century English literature, he has edited nine books, including Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying (2 vols. 1989), for Oxford English Texts (Clarendon Press), and written a critical study, The Sempiternal Season: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Devotional Writing (1992), and Izaak Walton: 1593-1683 (1998). He is the author of over ninety articles and reviews, including “Milton’s Lycidas and Earlier Seventeenth-Century Opera,” in Milton in Italy (1991); “Of Prelacy and Polity in Milton and Hooker,” in Heirs of Fame: Milton and Writers of the English Renaissance (1995); and “Critical Directions in the Study of Early Modern Sermons,” in Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature (2002).
Dr. Stanwood was director of the Fourth International Milton Symposium, held at UBC in 1991, and was chair of the English graduate program. He is past president of the International Association of University Professors of English, and a 2003 recipient of the honorary degree of Doctor of Sacred Letters from the University of Trinity College, Toronto. He delivered the Sedgewick Lecture in March 2008, published as John Donne and the Line of Wit: From Metaphysical to Modernist (Ronsdale Press). In 2008 he was awarded the lifetime achievement award by the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies.