Honors in Literature
Co-winner – Edwin L. Shuman Award for Best Honors Thesis in Literature
An excerpt from When Women Teach: Female Pedagogues on the Early Modern Stage
As a whole, [my] project endeavors to disrupt the narrative of uninterrupted early modern patriarchy. Love’s Cure and As You Like It tell the stories of women who upset the power differential between the sexes and claim authority they could not ordinarily assume. These plays explore and interrogate the theater and the classroom as sites where gender performance can vitiate entrenched power structures. By examining the gendered pedagogical dynamics in these plays, I hope to reveal how every instance of teaching and learning offers opportunities for shifting the grounds of power and authority. They always allow for the possibility of resistance, transgression, and subversion—incrementally, perhaps, but no less powerful for that.