Moon-Crossed reimagines the central plot of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well as a means to examining the female monstrous in early modern drama, literature, and though. Why doesn’t Bertram like Helena? Because she’s a werewolf. But as he learns, she’s of a very noble line of werewolves. She saves the King of France, he learns a bit more…[Read more]

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]

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]

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]

In this article I ask what happens if we consider Jewett, who spent most of her adult life at the epicenter of New England intellectual culture, as a pivotal figure in the Western history of theorizing sexuality, and her 1884 novel, A Country Doctor, as a significant document in the history of theorizing sexual and gender deviation, perfectly…[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]

“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 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]

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]

In this paper I argue that the flowering of adaptation and appropriation surrounding Shakespeare indicate not a holy “bard” who is the apotheosis of Western culture but an ambiguous Shakespeare who provides a creative space for artisans and artists (among whom, I will suggest, we can include critics and scholars). Having identified a “Sh…[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]

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]

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]

Because of a series of miscommunications, I originally wrote a 6000-word essay for the Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare on Ophelia and Popular Culture rather than the 1500 words that it turned out they wanted. Bruce R. Smith graciously let me go up to 3000 words, and I republished some of my research in other articles, but some of this…[Read more]