Jennifer Waldron

  • Associate Professor • English
  • Director of the Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Jennifer Waldron, Director of the Literature Program, specializes in the fields of Renaissance drama and post-Reformation religious controversy in England. Her interests include comparative media studies, ritual and performance theory, and histories of gender and the body. She received her BA in Comparative Literature (French, Spanish, and English) from Oberlin College, her MA in English Literature from New York University, and her PhD from Princeton University.

Her first book, Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), reexamines secularization narratives about Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in light of Protestant investments in the sacramental and symbolic powers of the human body. Her second book project, “Shakespeare and the Senses,” charts Shakespeare’s diverse experiments with cross-modal sensory and linguistic effects in relation to recent developments in historical phenomenology and current research in cognitive neuroscience. She is also co-editing, with Wendy Beth Hyman, a special issue of English Literary Renaissance titled "Theorizing Early Modern Fictions." 

Representative Publications

“Then Face to Face: Timing Trust in Macbeth” (chapter in edited volume), forthcoming in Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama: Ethics, Performance, Philosophy, edited by Matthew Smith and Julia R. Lupton (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). 

“Theater in Theory: Ancient to Early Modern,” for The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature, ed. Sean Keilen and Nick Moschovakis (Routledge, 2017).

“Dead Likenesses and Sex Machines: Shakespearean Media Theory,” for A Handbook of Shakespeare, Gender, and Embodiment (Oxford, 2016), edited by Valerie Traub.

“Lavinia is Philomel,” in Object Oriented Environs, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates (Punctum, 2016).  

“Shakespeare, Synaesthesia, and Post-Reformation Phenomenology,” Criticism 54.3 (2013): 403–417, in a special issue on “Shakespeare and Phenomenology,” ed. James Kearney and Kevin Curran.

“Of Stones and Stony Hearts: Desdemona, Hermione, and Post-Reformation Theater,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (Palgrave, 2012), ed. Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi.

“Reading the Body,” chapter 36 of A New Companion to Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Blackwell, 2010).