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Rebecca Bushnell

School of Arts and Sciences Board of Advisors Emerita Professor of English

Curriculum Vitae

Fisher-Bennett Hall 114
215-898-3936

Office Hours

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Rebecca Bushnell is the School of Arts and Sciences Board of Advisors Emerita  Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.  She received a BA from Swarthmore, an  MA from Bryn Mawr, and a Ph.D in  Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her monographs include Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles' Theban Plays (1988); Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in The English Renaissance (1990); A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (1996); Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (2003); Tragedy: A Short Introduction (2008); and  Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames: The Future in the Instant (2016). She has also edited A Companion to Tragedy (2005) and a multi-volume Cultural History of Tragedy (2019). Her new book, The Marvels of the World: An Anthology of Nature Writing Before 1700, an anthology of excerpts of premodern writing about the natural world, was published in 2021 by University of Pennsylvania Press. She is also working on projects on virtual theater and videogames.

Professor Bushnell has received an ACLS research fellowship and the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, as well as an NEH grant for Teaching with Technology. Professor Bushnell served as Associate Dean for the Humanities in the School of Arts and Sciences from 1998-2003, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 2003-2004, and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences from 2005-2013.  She was  President of the Shakespeare Association of America. She is also a member of the Board of Governors of the Folger Shakespeare Library and  Co-Chair of the Board of the Friends of Bryn Mawr Library.

 

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  • Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles' Theban Plays (Cornell 1988)
  • Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Cornell 1990)
  • A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Cornell 1996)
  • King Lear and Macbeth (annotated bibliography)  (Pegasus Press 1996)
  • Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Cornell 2003)
  • Editor, A Companion to Tragedy (Blackwell 2005)
  • Tragedy: A Short Introduction (Blackwell 2007)
  • Tragic Time in Drama, Film and Videogames: The Future in the Instant (Palgrave 2016)
  • A Cultural History of Tragedy, in six volumes (General Editor)  (Bloomsbury 2019)
  • The Marvels of the World: An Anthology of Nature Writing Before 1700 (Penn, 2021)

 


In collaboration with James Saeger, Michael Ryan and James Kearney, Professor Bushnell developed the "virtual" version of the Furness Shakespeare Library located in the Center for Electronic Text and Image of the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania.

Publications

Doctoral Dissertations Chaired

2003

Owen Williams "Trials of Conscience: Criminalizing Religious Dissidence in Elizabethan England"

1998

Theresa Suriano "Source and Discourse: Readings into Hamlet/Readings out of Hamlet"

1997

Peter Parolin "Not so Fitted a Place: English Identity and Italian Different in Early Modern England"

1995

Suzane Neureiter "Mapping Early Modern Witchcraft: A Study of Pamphlet, Treatise, and Drama"

1992

Christopher Fassler "Coriolanus, Community, Theatre and 17th Century Commonwealth"

1991

Elisabeth Magnus "Escaping the Dominion of Grace: Holy Power and the Mystic Subversion in 17th Century Texts"

Courses Taught

spring 2018

ENGL 103.402 Tragedy  

fall 2017

ENGL 016.301 Arts and Nature  

spring 2017

fall 2016

ENGL 020.301 Literature Before 1660  

spring 2016

fall 2015

fall 2014

ENGL 103.401 Tragedy  
ENGL 800.301 Pedagogy  

fall 2013

ENGL 103.401 Tragedy  

fall 2012

ENGL 020.301 Literature Before 1660  

fall 2011

ENGL 016.301 Tragedy canceled  

fall 2010

ENGL 020.301 Literature Before 1660  

fall 2009

ENGL 016.301 Tragedy  

fall 2008

ENGL 020.001 Literature Before 1660  

fall 2007

ENGL 016.301 Tragedy  

fall 2006

ENGL 016.301 Tragedy  

fall 2005

ENGL 229.401 Tragedy  

spring 2005

ENGL 103.402 Study of a Genre: Tragedy  

fall 2003

ENGL 299.305 Oscar Wilde  

fall 2002

ENGL 731.301 Renaissance Prose  

spring 2002

ENGL 538.401 Renaissance Languages canceled  

spring 2000

spring 1998

ENGL 299.321 Bible as Literature  

fall 1997

ENGL 201.301 Major British Writers  

spring 1997

ENGL 201.302 Major British Writers  
ENGL 299.338 Independent Study  

spring 1996

ENGL 101.001 Shakespeare  
ENGL 199.310 Multimedia Poetry  
ENGL 299.313 Independent Study  

fall 1995

fall 1994