Jennifer Waldron
Contact Information
Associate Professor
Director of the Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies
CL 617G
Jennifer Waldron, Director of the Literature Program, specializes in the fields of Renaissance drama and post-Reformation religious controversy in England. Her interests include comparative media studies, ritual and performance theory, 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 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 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. She is also co-editing, with Wendy Beth Hyman, a special issue of English Literary Renaissance titled "Theorizing Early Modern Fictions."
Research and Publications
“Then Face to Face: Timing Trust in Macbeth” (chapter in edited volume), forthcoming in Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama: Ethics, Performance, Philosophy, edited by Matthew Smith and Julia R. Lupton (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
“Theater in Theory: Ancient to Early Modern,” for The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature, ed. Sean Keilen and Nick Moschovakis (Routledge, 2017).
“Dead Likenesses and Sex Machines: Shakespearean Media Theory,” for A Handbook of Shakespeare, Gender, and Embodiment (Oxford, 2016), edited by Valerie Traub.
“Lavinia is Philomel,” in Object Oriented Environs, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates (Punctum, 2016).
“Shakespeare, Synaesthesia, and Post-Reformation Phenomenology,” Criticism 54.3 (2013): 403–417, in a special issue on “Shakespeare and Phenomenology,” ed. James Kearney and Kevin Curran.
“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.
“Reading the Body,” chapter 36 of A New Companion to Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Blackwell, 2010).
Teaching
Graduate Courses
Early Modern Mass Media: Print, Performance, Publics
Gender and the Body on the Early Modern Stage
Shakespeare and Adaptation
Theory/Technology/Media from Plato to Video Games (co-taught with Dan Morgan)
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
Service and Other Duties
Director, Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Member, Graduate Procedures Committee
Member, Graduate Placement and Professional Development Committee
Member, Literature Curriculum Committee
