Nancy Frelick

Nancy Frelick is an Associate Professor of French Renaissance Literature and English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia, where she has been teaching since 1990. She holds appointments in both the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies and the English Language and Literatures department within the Faculty of Arts.

Dr. Frelick earned her MA from the University of Alberta and her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on sixteenth-century French literature, particularly the works of Maurice Scève, Michel de Montaigne, François Rabelais, Louise Labé, Marguerite de Navarre, Marie de Gournay, Hélisenne de Crenne, and Jeanne Flore.

Her scholarly work explores discourses of desire in early modern texts through multiple theoretical lenses including post-structuralist psychoanalytic criticism (Lacan), gender studies, literary theory, and cultural studies. She has published extensively on mirror motifs, emblem books, and early modern medicine, particularly melancholy and lovesickness. Her research spans auto/biography, Europe, feminism, post-colonial studies, post-modernism, post-structuralism, sexuality, literary theory, comparative literature, and psychoanalysis.

Her recent publications demonstrate a continued focus on gender studies, psychoanalytic criticism, and French Renaissance literature, with numerous articles published between 2015-2024 examining mirror imagery, women writers, and theoretical approaches to early modern texts.

Dr. Frelick has authored the book Délie as Other: Toward a Poetics of Desire in Scève's Délie (1994) and co-edited Subject/Object and Beyond: Women in Early Modern France (2024) and The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: Specular Reflections (2016).

She serves as a guest editor for special journal issues, including recent work on Marguerite de Navarre, and continues to be an active contributor to scholarly conversations about women writers of the early modern period, gender representation, and theoretical approaches to Renaissance literature.