I came to New York City in 1999 after earning my PhD from the University of Washington.
I teach at Hunter College, of the City University of New York, a liberal arts institution that serves the city’s public school students primarily, many of whom are first in their families to go to college. Over 100 languages are spoken at Hunter, a testament to CUNY’s and New York City’s commitment to immigrants from all over the world. 75% of our students graduate debt free and are taught by a vibrant faculty from all over the country and the world.
I am privileged to teach students who are curious, genuinely hungry for knowledge, and earnestly committed to their studies—often in the face of formidable financial and personal struggles. In the classroom, discussion is lively and focused, with a reciprocal excitement that passes from me to the students, and from them back to me. We read from the text aloud, pick lines apart, think about word choice and rhythm of language. We ask, what is the function of this character or event in the larger scope of a play? How do language, characters, and events force certain kinds of questions, emotions, critical readings? What are the requirements of various genres, and how do the individual plays respond to or revise those conventions? What do the plays tell us about the early modern period and its people? How do the texts we read inform our own understanding of gender, sexuality, race, class, religion? How do they help us understand who we are? This is not to promote universality, which is a false and damaging fiction. The texts are specific to their time, but they do offer a history that allows us to recognize how we got here. Along with my regular teaching load, I have been privileged to supervise numerous MA theses and independent study projects. There is something particularly rewarding about helping students to dive into work they are excited about, arguments they have started in a class but want to study more closely, with deep attention to scholarship, history, and the text.
My research interests include Early Modern English drama, particularly Shakespeare, and the intersections between literature, culture, gender, law, and politics. I teach Shakespeare, late 16th and early 17th century English drama, early modern English women writers, and feminist theory.
Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy (U of Delaware P, 2003) is based on my dissertation and examines a dynamics of gender and power staged in Shakespearean tragedy that does not shrink at the violence with which women characters take power and rejects the notion that their subsequent acts of violence are transgressions of proper femininity. In fact, the notion of both proper and improper forms of femininity are held fundamentally in question throughout this study. Thus, the tragedies reject a phantasmatics of feminine identity, exorcise binaries of good and evil, and instead focus on the cultural dynamics of gender and power which both narrowed and expanded women’s roles. Sadly, this book is out of print. It is available on Google Play Books & Questia (through your library subscription service).
My second book, Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal (Routledge, 2017), focuses on the dramatic and rhetorical work of women’s defenses against men’s accusations of adultery. Women reject men’s stories by occupying a position of simultaneous action and honor, so that the plays stage a structure of accusation and defense that unravels the authority of husbands to make and unmake wives. Women’s active and voluble counter narratives of virtue and obedience, fidelity and love, work loose the fabric of masculine privileges in marriage, so that the rhetoric of defense turns into a site of agency while simultaneously remaining bound to the rhetoric of the accusation. Men’s and women’s competing narratives of marital betrayal uncover the ethical and political stakes for women in men’s stories of feminine duplicity. The necessity of a response, the need to defend themselves, opens opportunities for women to alter the dramatic direction, energy, and matter of the plays. A preview of the introduction is available from Taylor and Francis. Chapter one, “Early Modern Women’s Narratives of Marital Betrayal,” is available in Routledge’s Shakespeare Studies Chapter Sampler.
In 2021, Emily G. Sherwood (BA and PhD CUNY, Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab and Studio X at University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries) and I published a collection of letters, a legal complaint, and final award of indenture that document the marital troubles of Elizabeth and Anthony Bourne, both children of courtiers during the reign of Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth I. Along with a critical introduction, Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne: Marriage, Separation, and Legal Controversies appears in Routledge’s series, “The Early Modern Englishwoman, 1500-1750: Contemporary Editions,” edited by Betty S. Travitsky and Anne Lake Prescott.
Finally, I am at the beginning stages of thinking about a project tentatively titled Feminist Ethics in Early Modern English Drama that is influenced by The Government of Self and Others by Michel Foucault who studies a form of rhetoric called parrēsia, a term that the OED defines as “free-spokenness, . . . Chiefly [in] Rhetoric. Frankness or boldness of speech.” He argues that “[p]arrēsia founds democracy and democracy is the site of parrēsia” (Government of Self 300), so that freedom of speech is linked to questions of sovereignty that I read in light of women’s discursive practices in early modern drama. I posit a feminist ethics of citizenship on the part of female characters in plays such as The Two Noble Kinsmen, All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, King Henry VIII, The Tragedy of Mariam, The Maid’s Tragedy, and The White Devil. Feminist ethics in this sense may, as Sara Ahmed argues, offer “a feminist critique of a universalist ethical paradigm [aligned] with the values associated with the ‘feminine’, not as that which women simply are, but as that which is made invisible by the universalist criteria implicit in the ideal observer. A feminist ethics may help here to expose how ethics involves fluid and contingent relationships between subjects and bodies (rather than an abstract self). Such an ethics may employ values such as ‘care’ and ‘connection’ precisely to dislodge the universalist language of past ethical paradigms in order that women can become visible as subjects of and in ethics” (Differences that Matter 53). Focused on women’s points of view and acts that are troubling and ethically questionable (such as the bed trick or murder), I trace how these female characters also work from a rhetorical and substantive space of integrity that challenges the ethical standards deployed by a dominant social structure in place not only in a text, but also in the early modern period.
