Christopher P. Baker

— Biography from the 2021 Spring Commencement program —

Dr. Baker received his Bachelor of Arts with Highest Honors in English from St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York in 1968 and his MA. (1970) and Ph.D. (1974) degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializing in literature of the English Renaissance. He began his academic career at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas in 1976, where he taught courses ranging from Developmental English ro graduate seminars and served as Director of Freshman English and Director of the College of Liberal Arts Advising Center. Dr. Baker received the Lamar Regents' Merit Teaching Award and served in the faculty senates at Lamar and later Armstrong Atlantic State University. He was selected as an American Council on Education fellow for 1988-89. From 1994-98 he was Head of the Department of Languages, Literature, and Dramatic Arts at Armstrong State, later consolidated with Georgia Southern University. He taught courses in Shakespeare, Milton, the English Renaissance, the Bible as Literature, and Classical Mythology as well as the Senior Capstone in English, first-year composition, and several core curriculum courses. Dr. Baker edited Absolutism and the Scientific Revolution 1600-1720: A Biographical Dictionary (Greenwood, 2002) and published Religion in the Age of Shakespeare (Greenwood, 2007). He has published over 150 book chapters, articles, and reviews in prominent journals such as Renaissance Quarterly, journal of Comparative Drama, Milton Studies, Studia Neophilologica, and Explorations in Renaissance Culture. He is currently an Associate Editor for the forthcoming new variorum edition of Shakespeare's Cymbeline, to be issued by the Texas A&M University Center of Digital Humanities Research. Dr. Baker has presented over fifty papers at professional conferences in the United States and Canada, served on the Governing Council of the Sixteenth Century Society, and was twice President of the South Central Renaissance Conference. In recognition of his teaching, research, and service, Armstrong awarded him the Distinguished Faculty Service to the Discipline Award (2004- 2005) and the H. Dean Propst Award as the Outstanding Faculty Member of Armstrong State University (2016). For these many contributions to his field, Dr. Christopher Baker is deserving of the title Professor Emeritus of English.*