A specialist in the Renaissance and in seventeenth-century English literature, he has edited nine books, including the final three parts of Richard Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity (Harvard, 1981), John Donne and the Theology of Language (1986), Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying (Oxford English Texts, 2 vols. 1989), and written such critical studies as The Sempiternal Season: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Devotional Writing (1992), and Izaak Walton: 1593-1683 (1998). He is the author of over a hundred articles and reviews, including “Milton’s Lycidas and Earlier Seventeenth-Century Opera,” in Milton in Italy (1991); “Of Prelacy and Polity in Milton and Hooker,” in Heirs of Fame: Milton and Writers of the English Renaissance (1995); and “Critical Directions in the Study of Early Modern Sermons,” in Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature (2002). He is currently collaborating with Torrance Kirby, John King, and Mary Morrissey on an edition of sermons descriptive of "Paul's Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520-1640," and contributing to the Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Religion.
Dr. Stanwood was director of the Fourth International Milton Symposium, held at UBC in 1991, and was chair of the English graduate program. He is a past president of the John Donne Society, past president of the International Association of University Professors of English, and a 2003 recipient of the honorary degree of Doctor of Sacred Letters from the University of Trinity College, Toronto. He delivered the Sedgewick Lecture at UBC in March 2008, published as John Donne and the Line of Wit: From Metaphysical to Modernist (2009). In 2008 he was presented with the lifetime achievement award by the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies, and in 2010 with the John Donne Society Distinguished Service Award. In November 2013 he was invested into the Order of the Diocese of New Westminster.