One-year Sabbatical

Professor

English

In the English Department I teach courses on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as well as Intro to Poetry and LGBTQ literature. Two of the classes closest to my early modern theatrical heart are Renaissance Drama and Shakespeare's Histories. My book, Early Modern Thatre and the Figure of Disability, investigates the labor of physically disabled characters in early modern English theatre. I show that early modern theatrical representation relied on representations of physical disability to navigate the "likeness problems" of theatre. The first of these likeness problems is the relationship between actor and character: prosthetic disabled figures with names like Cripple and Stump capture the simultaneous presence of the imaginative world of the fiction and the material, embodied world of the theatre. The second likeness problem mediated by the bodies of early modern disabled characters is the relationship between plays in their theatrical and in their textual forms. This relationship, beginning in the period itself, has been understood in part through an appeal to disability: supposedly imperfect textual versions of plays are characterized as "lame." Attention to physical disability enriches our understanding of early modern ideas about how theatre works; as well, theatre's distinctiveness as a medium offers a reframing of disability as metaphor. I love integrating these questions about how thatre works and transforms texts into my classroom.

CV

Regular Classes