Research Overview

Rosemary Kegl works on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Renaissance literature and culture. Her research interests include the complicated relationships among the formal properties of Renaissance writing, the tensions in Renaissance society, and the texture of a utopian sensibility; among various models of literary and historical analysis; and among sites and kinds of intellectual activity. She is currently working on two book manuscripts, Revisiting Death in English Renaissance Drama: Apostrophe, Tragicomedy, and Utopia andTabloid Shakespeare at the 1934 Chicago World's Fair. The first project analyzes the considerable interpretive demands that staged death places on the plays’ characters and their Renaissance audiences. The second brings together a series of essays (on topics like archival research, education, historical criticism, intellectual activity, interdisciplinary analysis, and popular culture) occasioned by the interpretive questions that arise when we examine the inclusion of Shakespeare’s abbreviated plays in Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition.

Research Interests

• Shakespeare and English Renaissance drama
• early modern literature and culture
• literary theory
• gender studies

Selected Publications

• The Rhetoric of Concealment: Figuring Gender and Class in Renaissance Literature, Cornell 1994
• "Theaters, Households, and a 'Kind of History' in Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam," in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, ed. Anne Russell and Viviana Comensoli, Illinois 1999
• "'[W]rapping togas over Elizabethan garb': Tabloid Shakespeare at the 1934 Chicago World's Fair," in Spatial Properties of the Renaissance Stage, spec. issue of Renaissance Drama 28 (1997 [1999])
• "'The World I Have Made': Margaret Cavendish, Feminism, and the Blazing-World," in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan, Cambridge 1996
• "Women's Preaching, Absolute Property, and the Cruel Sufferings
  (for the Truth's Sake) of Katharine Evans and Sarah Chevers," in Gender, Literature, and the English Revolution, spec. double issue of Women's Studies 24.1-2 (1994)
• "'The Adoption of Abominable Terms': The Insults That Shape Windsor's Middle Class," in ELH 61.2 (1994), reprinted in Shakespeare Criticism Yearbook 28 (1994), ed. Michael Magoulias, Gale Research 1995
• "'Those Terrible Aproches': Sexuality, Social Mobility, and Resisting the Courtliness of Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie," in English Literary Renaissance 20.2 (1990)
• "'Joyning my Labour to my Pain': The Politics of Labor in Marvell's Mower Poems," in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus, Chicago 1990

Teaching

• Courses in Shakespeare, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and culture, women's writing, Marxist theory

Honors

• Member, Central Executive Committee, Folger Institute, Folger Shakespeare Library, 1996-present
• Folger Shakespeare Institute Short-Term Fellowship, August 2006
• Folger Shakespeare Institute Grant-in-Aid, to support participation in the Institute Colloquium, Puzzling Evidence, 1999-2000
• Butler Professor, Department of English, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1999
• Newberry Library/National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1993
• Newberry Library Short-Term Resident Fellowship, 1991
• Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities/Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, 1983-85 and 1987-88