Attenuated Shakespearean references in popular cultural texts communicate meaning only because audiences, storytellers, and lovers all over the world identify the scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet instantly as an emblem of romantic love. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, and Antony and Cleopatra likewise include scenes i…[Read more]

Screened performances screen out the qualities of ‘liveness’ – immediacy, unpredictability, ephemerality, spatial proximity, danger – to varying degrees according to their media, contexts, and audiences. As Philip Auslander has argued, ‘liveness’ itself is intermedial; in order to characterize a performance as ‘live,’ we contrast it to a ‘mediat…[Read more]

“Focus on ‘Henry V'” is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, digital Open Educational Resource co-authored and co-produced by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates on the innovative digital publishing platform Scalar. Chapters include guides to early printed editions, sources, and performance and cinematic histories of the play, as well as…[Read more]

This essay considers the use that twenty-first-century fictionalized cancer narratives make of Shakespeare’s words, the Shakespeare industry, and editorial and textual apparatuses to trope the ambiguous status of the post-millennial cancer patient. In the so-called “women’s novel” The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown, the genre thriller What Time De…[Read more]

This paper applies the concept of sustainability to humanities research and assessment, extending Donald Stokes’s model of “Pasteur’s Quadrant” to suggest a place for humanities- and arts-based scholarship and to identify humanistic practices and methods through which we might “assess” them. It concludes with a reading that deploys the scholarly…[Read more]

The Afterword to this EMLS Special Issue “European Women in Early Modern English Drama” contextualizes this collection in light of our continued scholarly and social investigation into the invention of “whiteness” and of a pan-European identity. It argues that texturing the flat surface of “whiteness” and “Europeanness” can enable us to “…[Read more]

This essay argues that Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) deploys feminist intermediality to appropriate Othello in the service of a highly nuanced womanist aesthetics. The essay defines and offers examples of some important theoretical approaches, including: appropriation studies; intersectional feminism; intermediality; w…[Read more]

In 2016 Paapa Essiedu, a British actor of Ghanaian ancestry, starred as Hamlet in Simon
Godwin’s lauded Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production, set in a post-colonial
African state whose non-specificity nonetheless irritated some reviewers. We contend,
however, that the production mixed multiple referents of blackness (Eastern A…[Read more]

Non-copy-edited MS Word doc of the intro to my edited collection _Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (Routledge, 2015), uploaded in accordance with publisher’s Green OA policies.

This is the non-copy-edited Microsoft Word manuscript of my chapter in the edited collection _Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body_ (Routledge, 2015), uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s “Green OA” rules.

Chapter in exhibition “Voices of Tolerance in an Age of Persecution” curated by Vincent Carey at the Folger in 2002.

Hugh M. Richmond, “Renaissance Landscapes,” Mouton, 1973; De Gruyter 2019.

This study explores some of the significant points in the evolution of a literary pattern, a recognizable topic or motif which captures attention through the poet’s mastery of language, which records the nuances of human awareness of each period. The author coins this…[Read more]

Performance review of “Romeo and Juliet,” Oregon Shakespeare Festival (2018).

How will immersive virtual reality (VR) cognitively affect the audiences who interface with it to interpret Shakespeare performances? Current theories of performance and cognition are based on theatre and film audiences, but VR performances combine features of both media: a disembodied spectral presence, like a theatrical audience; and a flexible…[Read more]

English 412 is, in its official description, “A survey of drama from 1558 to 1603, including works by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.” In this version from 2017, students focused on six revenge tragedies, the blockbuster genre of the Elizabethan theatre: plays filled with bloody violence, elevated rhetoric, and ghosts imploring…[Read more]

Sophisticated digital platforms and infrastructures offer scholarly editors opportunities to make textual materials accessible and negotiable online. Still, we feel pressure to reify the passive reading experience within a web browser. The challenge lies in constructing (or reconstructing) our texts to best provide for dynamic text and data…[Read more]

This essay argues that feminists can productively use theories of intermediality to consider postmodern representations of Shakespeare’s Ophelia fabricated by women (or by creators self-identified as female, in the case of online avatars), in order to explore the following questions: under what circumstances might we imagine femininity as…[Read more]

The belief that Francis Bacon was, from the start, a stalwart defender of royal absolutism has prevailed in scholarship despite occasional comments about Bacon’s pluralist or collaborative legal and political imagination. Building on recent revisionist work, this article questions the standard historiography. It argues that Bacon’s jur…[Read more]

Alfonso de Toledo (15th century) was, indeed, a curious guy. But he was doing something with his curiosity. He was researching and translating. He was focusing on particular themes and institutions, and giving a legal and juridical reading of them –he, as he confesses, has very little theology to forget, so even theological inventions are, for h…[Read more]