Speakers

Jean E. Howard is the George Delacorte Professor of Humanities at Columbia University where she teaches early modern literature and feminist studies. Her books include Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, Engendering a Nation (with Phyllis Rackin), and most recently, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598-1642. One of the four editors of The Norton Shakespeare, she has co-edited a number of collections on early modern literature and has held many fellowships including the Guggenheim, ACLS, NEH, Folger Library, and Huntington Library Fellowships. Most recently she edited a forum on Early Modern Cosmopolitanism for Shakespeare Studies and served as co-editor of a volume of essays forthcoming in The Huntington Library Quarterly on The Places and Spaces of Early Modern London. She is currently working on two books: a study of the contemporary dramatist Caryl Churchill and an investigation of the emergence of "town culture" in Caroline London.

Aranye Fradenburg received her PhD in English from the University of Virginia. After teaching at Dartmouth College for several years, she joined the English and Medieval Studies faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is now a Full Professor. Her most recent book is Sacrifice Your Love:  Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer; her other titles include City, Marriage, Tournament:  Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland, and Premodern Sexualities. She is now a third-year candidate at the New Center for psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, and practices sychotherapy at New Beginnings Counseling Center in Santa Barbara.

Madhavi Menon is Assistant Professor of Literature at American University. She is the author of Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama and of Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film (forthcoming from Palgrave, 2008). She is working on an edited collection of essays called Shakesqueer. Her current work is interested in the methodological assumptions we bring to studies of desire, the past, and past desires.

Kathryn Schwarz received her PhD in English language and literature from Harvard University in 1994. She is the author of Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance, which was awarded the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize for Literature by the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in 2001. Her articles have appeared in journals including Renaissance Drama, Shakespeare Quarterly, PMLA, differences, and Studies in English Literature. Currently, she is working on a book which investigates the relationships among femininity, intention, virtue and misogyny in the early modern period, focusing particularly on the ways in which the conventions that govern feminine behavior are complicated by their willful enactment. This book, Shakespeare, Will, and Women, suggests that by knowingly inhabiting conditions such as beauty, virginity, constancy, and maternity, virtuous feminine subjects illuminate and trouble the ideologies of gender.

Conference Organizer

Henry S. Turner comes to Rutgers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught from 2000 to 2007. He earned his BA from Wesleyan University, an MA in Renaissance Studies and Critical Theory from the University of Sussex, an MA, MPhil and PhD from Columbia University, and a Diplôme Supérieur d'Études Françaises from the Université de Bourgogne. He has just completed a book entitled Shakespeare’s Double Helix, which is forthcoming in December 2007 from Continuum Press. He is also the author of a book on Renaissance drama, practical knowledge, and the history of scientific thought entitled The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, and the editor of The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in ELH, Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Twentieth Century Literature, and The History of Cartography (University of Chicago Press). He is a contributor to The Norton Anthology of Drama (forthcoming 2007) and is co-editor of the book series Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity (Ashgate Press).

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