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. Her first book, Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater, 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 takes up Shakespeare’s career-long exploration of the power of language to produce effects of scale, from concrete sensory experiences of space and time to complex models of collectivity and individuality. She is also co-editing, with Wendy Beth Hyman, a special issue of the journal English Literary Renaissance, titled "Theorizing Early Modern Fictions."

Representative Publications

“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,” ed. James Kearney and Kevin Curran.