Jennifer Waldron, Director of the Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, specializes in the fields of Renaissance Drama and post-Reformation religious controversy in England. Her interests include ritual and performance theory, religious polemic, word/image problems, and histories of gender and the body. She received her BA in Comparative Literature (French, Spanish, and English) from Oberlin College, her MA in English Literature from New York University, and her PhD from Princeton University.

Her first book, Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater, is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan. The project reexamines secularization narratives about Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in light of Protestant investments in the sacramental and symbolic powers of the human body. Her second book project, “Shakespeare and the Senses,” charts Shakespeare’s diverse experiments with cross-modal sensory and linguistic effects in relation to recent developments in historical phenomenology and current research in cognitive neuroscience.

Select Publications

“Of Stones and Stony Hearts: Desdemona, Hermione, and Post-Reformation Theater,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (Palgrave, 2012), ed. Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi.

“Shakespeare, Synaesthesia, and Post-Reformation Phenomenology,” forthcoming in a special issue of Criticism 54:3, “Shakespeare and Phenomenology,” ed. Kevin Curran and James Kearney.

“Reading the Body,” chapter 36 of A New Companion to Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Blackwell, 2010).

“Beyond Words and Deeds: Montaigne’s Soldierly Style,” Philological Quarterly 82:1 (2003).

Teaching

• Graduate Courses
  • Gender and the Body on the Early Modern Stage
    Shakespeare and Adaptation
  • Word and Image
• Undergraduate Courses
  • Early Modern Literatures in English
  • Introduction to Critical Reading
  • Introduction to Shakespeare
  • Junior Seminar: Word and Image
  • Junior Seminar: Tragedy
  • Lectures in Literature
  • The Renaissance in England

University Service

• Director, Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies

• Member, Graduate Procedures Committee

• Member, Graduate Placement and Professional Development Committee

• Member, Literature Curriculum Committee