About the Course
In this 4-week course we will read Hamlet, Othello, MacBeth and King Lear. Our classes will be structured around discussion of guided reading questions, provided to you one week in advance. We will cover all of the above in closer detail, with a particular focus on the following key topics:
Shakespearean Tragedy in Context
Hamlet and the performativity of revenge
Difficult Women on the early modern stage
Kingship and its discontents in Jacobean England
Skepticism and Tragic Knowledge
I received my doctorate in 2019 from the University of Edinburgh, where I taught several undergraduate courses, ranging from medieval and early modern literature, to Romantic, Modernist and Late-Modernist poetry and drama. My doctoral research examined the relationship between processes of state-formation in early modern England and the spectacular flourishing of religious poetry witnessed during the same period. This work has been published by leading academic journals in my field, and tries to show that religious poetry was vitally and critically responsive to broad changes in social relations and practices of rule in 17C England.
In my teaching, as in my research, I'm drawn to examining intellectual history and literary art in the context of given social and political conditions.