Alicia Meyer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English with a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Her dissertation project, The Bridewell Standard: Common Women, Race, and Agency on the Early Modern Stage offers a new political history of marginalized women and reassesses feminist formations of gender and political agency through the history of Bridewell Hospital: a prison and charitable institution dedicated to the reform of “masterless women” in early modern England and its colonies. The Bridewell Standard argues that dramatists from Shakespeare to Aphra Behn represent masterless women through constitutive hierarchies of race, gender, and deviant sexuality as part of a political standard in the service of empire. Research for this project has been supported by UCLA’s Clark Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Harvard’s Houghton Library, and Penn’s Kislak Center for Special Collections.

Meyer’s research is invested in premodern race studies, feminism, queer theory, and material culture. She regularly teaches courses on Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, British literature and poetry, gender and sexuality, women writers, and political history. She has served as the Graduate Assistant at the Penn Women’s Center. She was Graduate Associate for Penn’s Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program in 2019-2020 and 2020-2021. And she was the Dissertation Fellow with the Kislak Center for Special Collections in 2020-2021.