Professor Bartels is author of Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello (2008) and Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (1993), which won the Roma Gill Prize for Best Work on Christopher Marlowe, 1993-94.  She is co-editor, with Emma Smith (University of Oxford), of Christopher Marlowe in Context (2013) and editor of Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe (1997). Her most recent essays include: “Strange Bedfellows: The Ordinary Undersides of ‘A True Reportory’ and The Tempest,” “Identifying ‘the Dane’: Gender and Race in Hamlet” (2016); and “Julius Caesar: Making history” (2016).

Professor Bartels's graduate and undergraduate courses have centered on early modern literature and culture, with a focus on Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean drama. She is especially interested in questions of race, cross-cultural relations, gender, genre, and performance. 

Professor Bartels has received the Board of Trustees Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence (1993), the School of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Contributors to Undergraduate Education (2008 & 1993), and the Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching (2008) from Rutgers University. She has also been the recipient of a Solmsen Fellowship at the Institute of Research in the Humanities, at the University of Wisconsin (1995); and a Black Atlantic Project fellowship from the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. Since 2010 she has been the director, and is now dean, of the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English, a summer Master’s program designed for K-12 English and language arts teachers.

• Seminar: Othello
• Seminar: Hamlet
• Principles of Literary Study
• Drama in the Age of Shakespeare
• Elizabethan and Jacobean Shakespeare
• Renaissance Literature and Culture
• Seventeenth Century Literature
• Shakespeare and the Production of History
• Shakespeare Page and Stage

• Shakespeare Page and Stage
• Renaissance Literature and the Fashioning of Cultures
• Critical Approaches to Shakespeare
• Shakespeare in Contexts
• Imperialist Beginnings
• Critical Reading
• Writing Seminar

• Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching, Rutgers, 2008-09
• School of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Contributors to Undergraduate Education, Rutgers, 2008-09
• Fellowship, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis: The Black Atlantic Project, 1997-98
• Solmsen Fellowship, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1995-96
• Roma Gill Prize for Best Work on Christopher Marlowe, 1993-94, for Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe
• Board of Trustees Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence, Rutgers, 1993
• Faculty of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Contributors to Undergraduate Education, Rutgers, 1993

• Shakespeare Association of America

• “Strange Bedfellows: The Ordinary Undersides of ‘A True Reportory’ and The Tempest”
  In Travel and Drama in Early Modern England: The Journeying Play, ed. Claire Jowitt & David McInnis, Cambridge University Press, 2018
• "Too Many Blackamoors: Deportation, Discrimination, and Elizabeth I" SEL: Studies in English Literature 46.2, Spring 2006
• "Othello and Africa: Postcolonialism Reconsidered" The William and Mary Quarterly 54. 1, January 1997
• "Strategies of Submission: Desdemona, the Duchess, and the Assertion of Desire" SEL: Studies in English Literature 36.2, Spring 1996
• “Imperialist Beginnings: Richard Hakluyt and the Construction of Africa” Criticism 34 (1992)
• “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race” Shakespeare Quarterly, Winter 1990
• “Malta, the Jew, and the Fictions of Difference: Colonialist Discourse in Marlowe’s the Jew of Malta” English Literary Renaissance 20 (1990)