Prof. Mary C Fuller

Professor Fuller's book, Lines Drawn Across the Globe (2023) has a broader focus, studying a multi-volume collection of hundreds of travel narratives, royal letters, ships’ logs, maps, price lists, and commentaries printed in 1600 to document the global reach of English merchants and mariners. Assembled by an English minister who knew many of his voyager/ authors, this vast work covers regions from the Arctic to the Straits of Magellan, from Sierra Leone, Russia, Morocco, Iceland, the Ottoman Empire, Mongolia, the Caribbean, and Persia. Its contents call on disciplinary knowledge from archaeology, botany, cartography, ethnography, geography, the history of information, library studies, mining and metallurgy, naval history, religious history, sociology, and numerous national and regional histories. Building the intellectual networks that made her own book possible was one of the fascinating aspects of the project. Being responsible to its subjects called for long and deep reflection.

At MIT, Fuller teaches poetry. Her introductory classes look at modern and contemporary American poetry; she’s interested in how to approach poems from a naïve perspective, and in teaching students how to ask questions that are both answerable and have answers that accumulate into insight. As a specialist in the early modern period, she also teaches the works of Dante, John Milton, and Edmund Spenser in more advanced classes, aiming to make students confident readers of these influential and complex works and to use them (as the authors might have wished) to engage with fundamental debates about choice, freedom, power, and the way to live.

Professor Fuller has served on the Nominations Committee, the Committee on the Undergraduate Program, the Committee on the Graduate Program, SOCR, the Faculty Policy Committee, and the Corporation Joint Advisory Committee, on numerous other advisory and steering committees at the Institute. In addition to the MacVicar Fellowship, she has received the SHASS Levitan Prize, the Levitan Teaching Award, and the Outstanding Veteran Advisor award for first-year advising. She has held research fellowships at the Folger, Newberry, John Carter Brown, and Huntington Libraries, and received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Soon after joining the faculty, Fuller also began studying the Japanese martial art of aikido. She was fortunate in meeting Mitsunari Kanai Sensei, who had been an apprentice of aikido’s founding master, and for many years took the Red Line to Kanai Sensei’s dojo in Porter Square for training five or six days a week. She began teaching classes at area dojos in the late ’90s, as well as travelling nationally and internationally for seminars with different teachers. Like any art or physical discipline practiced seriously, aikido provided hours of sustained focus that were a great respite from the demands of academic life; as a martial art devoted to harmonizing conflict, aikido also has offered useful lessons on the joys of working with people who are willing to come at you. She continues to study as her schedule permits, and holds the rank of godan (fifth degree black belt).