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);  Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames: The Future in the Instant (2016); and The Marvels of the World: An Anthology of Nature Writing Before 1700, an anthology of excerpts of premodern writing about the natural world (2021). She has also edited A Companion to Tragedy (2005), a multi-volume Cultural History of Tragedy (2019),  and A Midsummer Night's Dream: The State of Play (2025). She is currently working on a project on nature, time, and genre in Shakespeare's plays and poems.

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.

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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.