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  • Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: Zoom


It is our pleasure to announce that next Wednesday, Feb 17th at 4:30 PM EST, Kimberly Anne Coles (University of Maryland) will be delivering the 2021 Phyllis Rackin Lecture via Zoom. She will be delivering a talk entitled, "'Undisciplined': Early Modern Women's Writing and the Urgency of Scholarly Activism." 

The Phyllis Rackin lecture was established to honor Phyllis Rackin, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Pennsylvania and her groundbreaking work in the fields of both feminist scholarship and Early Modern studies. A former President of the Shakespeare Association of America, she has published numerous scholarly articles on Shakespeare and related subjects in anthologies and in such journals as PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Shakespeare-Jahrbuch. She has also published four books on Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Tragedies; Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles; and Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories, which she wrote in collaboration with Professor Jean Howard of Columbia University; and Shakespeare and Women. Her awards include an ACLS fellowship and a Lindback award for distinguished teaching.

 

Kimberly Anne Coles has written articles on the topics of women’s writing, gender, and religious ideology. Her book, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2008; pbk 2010) examines the influence of women writers on religious identity and its cultural expression in the sixteenth century. Her current book project, “Bad Humour: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England,” is under contract at the University of Pennsylvania Press." The book uncovers how belief itself — the excess, defect, or lack of religion — was largely apprehended and understood in terms of temperament in the early modern period. The medical theory of this period gave the prevailing sense that body and soul were in sympathy. The project explores what this implies for religious and racial identity. Her work has been supported by the John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress, the Warburg Institute, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.