Meghan Elizabeth Hall
she/her/hers
Dissertation Advisor(s): Ania Loomba
"Out of Compass: English Women's Writing and the Cultures of Travel, 1604-1680"
Graduate Program Coordinator, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania
My dissertation, "Out of Compass: English Women's Writing and the Cultures of Travel, 1604-1680," explores the relationship of gender, travel, and literary production in seventeenth-century women's writing. Bringing a spatio-linguistic analysis to bear on domestic dramas, romances, and autobiographies -- genres customarily associated with personal and domestic issues -- I tease out the spatial dynamics of these texts to reveal a breadth of concerns about the increasing popularity of travel in early modern England.
At Penn, I served on the Graduate English Association as Events Newsletter Editor, Social Chair, and ABD Representative, consecutively. I was also the Co-coordinator for the PreModern Studies Working Group (formerly the Medieval-Renaissance Seminar) in 2017-2018, and the Coordinator for the Graduate Revision Workshop in 2018-2019. I was a selected participant in the Folger Shakespeare Library's yearlong colloquium, "Gender, Race and Early Modern Studies," the inaugural program in the Folger's ongoing "Race B4 Race" series. I also organized panels and workshops at the Renaissance Society of America and Attending to Early Modern Women conferences.
I received my M.A. in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University in 2013, and m