faculty
Margie Burns has been an adjunct instructor in English since 1997. She received a BA in English and a PhD in Renaissance English Literature from Rice University, and taught in Mississippi and at College Park, Maryland, before coming to UMBC. Her interests include Shakespeare, Sinclair Lewis and Jane Austen. She teaches a range of writing courses, and her students have gone on to careers in journalism and in higher education.
Her scholarly articles have appeared in Shakespeare Studies; Persuasions (the Jane Austen annual); the International Journal of Moral and Social Studies (Oxford, GB), the Dictionary of American Biography; The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays and Theater Reviews (Garland); Women in the Renaissance; and Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et reforme. Her paper "Oedipus and Apollonius," on the late Shakespearean plays, won the Fritz Schmidl Memorial Prize for Research in Applied Psychoanalysis from the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society in 1989. Her articles on college faculty have appeared in Academe and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Burns is an active, widely published freelance journalist and political blogger in metropolitan Washington, DC, and is Washington correspondent for the Progressive Populist and a contributor to the Baltimore Chronicle, Chronicles magazine, the Washington Spectator newsletter, and other print and online periodicals. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; the Baltimore Sun; the Detroit Free Press; Legal Times; the Madison Capital Times; the Miami Herald; Salon.com; the St. Louis Journalism Review; the San Antonio Current; Style Weekly; the Waco Tribune Herald and elsewhere.
She is currently working on articles on historical English usage and the public discourse, including the history of 'high misdemeanor' in impeachment; and on a book on the late Shakespeare plays.
