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Gary Ferguson (literature scholar)

American professor of French

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionFeb 18, 2026
Entity authorityQ5525059 ↗
Source-derived summary

Gary Ferguson (born March 19, 1963), a specialist of French Renaissance literature and culture, is the Douglas Huntly Gordon Distinguished Professor of French at the University of Virginia. From 1989, he taught at the University of Delaware, where he held the Elias Ahuja Professorship of French from 2012 to 2015. He graduated from St Chad's College, Durham University, receiving a BA with first-class honours in 1985 and a Ph.D. in 1989.

He is the author of Mirroring Belief: Marguerite de Navarre's Devotional Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 1992), Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture (Ashgate, 2008; London and New York : Routledge, 2016), and Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome: Sexuality, Identity, and Community in Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 2016), as well as of numerous articles dealing in particular with questions of gender and sexuality, women's writing, devotional literature and the cultural history of religion. He has edited or co-edited a number of collections of scholarly essays, including (Re)Inventing the Past: Essays on French Early Modern Culture, Literature and Thought in Honour of Ann Moss (2003, with Catherine Hampton), Narrative Worlds: Essays on the ‘Nouvelle’ in 15th- and 16th-Century France (2005, with David LaGuardia), L’Homme en tous genres : masculinités, textes et contextes (2008), and A Companion to Marguerite de Navarre (2013, with Mary B. McKinley). He has also published a critical edition of Anne de Marquets's Sonets spirituels (Geneva : Droz, 1997).

Editorial summary

“Gary Ferguson (literature scholar)” enters the record as american professor of French. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gary, Ferguson and literature can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA useful biographical orientation record, particularly for establishing names, roles and a first chronology. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1963, 1989, 2012, 2015—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1963-03-19. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Gary, Ferguson and literature.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Gary Ferguson (literature scholar)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Gary, Ferguson and literature provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5525059. VIAF identifies the subject as 61615473. The Library of Congress control number is nr93014401. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1963, 1989, 2012 and 2015.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Gary Ferguson (literature scholar)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.