Alicia Meyer is a Dean’s postdoctoral fellow in Teaching Excellence in the Department of English and Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studie at the University of Pennsylvania.

Her book project, The Bridewell Standard: The Sexual Politics of Race and Gender in the Early Modern Atlantic, 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. 

Meyer’s research is focused on premodern race studies, feminism and queer theory, legal and political history, 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 the 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.