Jennifer Waldron
- Associate Professor
Jennifer's Affiliations: Cultural Studies, European Studies Center, Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Vibrant Media Lab
Jen Waldron teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Shakespeare, early modern literature, the history of media, and intersections of words and images in theater, book history, and graphic novels. She advises graduate students working in those and adjacent fields as well as supervising undergraduate research projects through ASRA, the Honors College, and more.
Waldron is the author of Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater, which reexamines secularization narratives about Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in light of Protestant investments in the sacramental and symbolic powers of the human body. Her current book project, Shakespeare and the Sense of Scale, takes up Shakespeare’s career-long exploration of the power of language to produce scalar effects, from concrete sensory experiences of space and time to complex models of collectivity and individuality. She recently completed a piece, titled “From Stage to Manga Page: Scalar Mediation and Shakespeare’s Tempest,” for Shakespeare and Comics, a collection edited by Brandon Christopher and Jim Casey. She also contributed a chapter, titled “Theatrical Experiments and Experiential Protestants: Shakespearean Iconoclasm in Love’s Labors Lost,” to a volume on Experiential & Experimental Knowledge on the Early Modern English Stage, edited by James Kearney and Pavneet Aulakh.
Waldron is also writing an article on “Shakespeare and Elizabethan Gun Culture” as part of her work with the Gun Violence and its Histories collaborative, which she co-founded with Pernille Roge (History), Chloe Hogg (French), and Chris Nygren (HAA) in 2018 after the Parkland shootings. GVH sponsors an ongoing series of talks and workshops that seeks to use the tools we have as humanists and scholars of early modernity to participate productively in ongoing discussions around guns, gun culture, and gun violence.
Education & Training
- PhD in English Literature (Renaissance Studies), Princeton University, 2004
- MA, English Literature, New York University, 1999
- BA, Comparative Literature (French, Spanish, and English), Oberlin College, 1991
Representative Publications
“The Politics of Scale in Shakespeare’s Henry V: Fiction, History, Theater,” in “Theorizing Early Modern Fictions,” a special issue of English Literary Renaissance 52.3 (Autumn 2022)
“Introduction: Interstitial Fictions” (co-written with Wendy Beth Hyman), in “Theorizing Early Modern Fictions,” a special issue of English Literary Renaissance 52.3 (Autumn 2022)
“Then Face to Face: Timing Trust in Macbeth,” in Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama: Ethics, Performance, Philosophy, edited by Matthew Smith and Julia R. Lupton (Edinburgh University Press, 2019)
“Dead Likenesses and Sex Machines: Shakespearean Media Theory,” for A Handbook of Shakespeare, Gender, and Embodiment (Oxford, 2016), edited by Valerie Traub
Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
“Shakespeare, Synaesthesia, and Post-Reformation Phenomenology,” Criticism 54.3 (2013): 403–417, in a special issue on “Shakespeare and Phenomenology,” edited by James Kearney and Kevin Curran
Research Interests
Shakespeare, early modern literature, the history of scale, Reformation religious controversy, word and image, comparative media studies, and histories of gender and the body.