Rebecca Bushnell is the School of Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught  since 1982.  She received a BA from Swarthmore, an  MA from Bryn Mawr, and a Ph.D in  Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her books include Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles' Theban Plays; Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought & Theater in The English Renaissance; A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice; and Green Desire, a study of early modern English gardening books. She has also published  A Companion to Tragedy and Tragedy: A Short Introduction. Her new book is called Tragic Time in Drama, FIlm, and Videogames: The Future in the Instant. She is now working on editing a multi-volume Cultural History of Tragedy.

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 Trustees of the Library Company of Philadelphia, Princeton Day School, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, and a member of the Advisory Board of Managers of the Morris Arboretum.

Books:

• 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 (Pegasus Press 1996)
• Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Cornell 2003)
• 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)

Courses:

Professor Bushnell has taught these courses in the past that focus on the teaching of literary research and method and the culture of the early modern period.

• English 709: Renaissance Languages
• English 271: Political Theater
• English 305: Literary Research and Method
• English 20: Literature before 1660
• English 16: Tragedy
• English 330: New Approaches to Renaissance Studies
  This course used the Web and other electronic technology to redesign the way we approach teaching the culture of the early modern period. This course is based on an earlier version, English 30, taught in the fall of 1995. (Its Web page was designed by Jamey Saeger, now at Vassar College.)

In addition, 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.