DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Biography

Wendy Wall (she/her/hers, Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) specializes in early modern literature and culture, with special interest in gender/sexuality studies, women’s writing, poetry, food studies, theater, and media studies (manuscript, print and digital cultures). Co-creator (with Leah Knight at Brock University) of the open access, critical edition, The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making (which presents the scientific, religious, political, and personal poetry of seventeenth-century writer Hester Pulter), she is also author of The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Cornell University Press, 1993), Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which was a finalist for the James Russell Lowell prize awarded by the MLA and a 2002 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award Winner; and Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). She is currently at work on a book entitled "Revolution, Resurrection, and Dissolution: Hester Pulter and a Reimagined Early Modern World." Past trustee and president of the Shakespeare Association of America, Professor Wall is avidly involved with public humanities partnerships, including teaching at Stateville Maximum Security Prison as part of the Northwestern Prison Education Program and the Prison +Neighborhood Arts Program; serving as a judge for the Chicago Shakespeare Slam; and participating in educational programs with the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, The Newberry Library, and the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Professor Wall has been the recipient of several grants and awards for her teaching and research, including the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence (2016-19), a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Teaching Award from Mortar Board, a Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award, the College of Arts and Sciences AT&T Research Fellowship, and the Wender-Lewis Research and Teaching Professorship. She was co-editor of Renaissance Drama from 1997-2005. She enjoys teaching courses on Global Shakespeare, Renaissance poetry, Renaissance drama, and contemporary fiction.

Professor Wall has published articles on topics as wide-ranging as editorial theory, gender, poetry, national identity, authorship, food studies, prison teaching, digital publishing, Shakespeare, print culture, domesticity, theatrical practice, and Jell-O.

Specializations

Science & Literature, Early Modern, Poetry & Poetics, Theatre & Drama, Language Technologies, Digital Media, Gender Studies

Books

The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making (pulterproject.northwestern.edu)

Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern Kitchen (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2002)

The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Cornell University Press, 1993)

Selected Articles

• “All’s Well That Ends Well: Seasoning and Recipe Writing.”  A Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, Race. Ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford University Press, 2016), 131-54.
• “Reversions: Domestic Ecologies in The Duchess of Malfi,” in John Webster’s ‘Dismal Tragedy’: The Duchess of Malfi Reconsidered, eds. Sophie Chiari and Sophie Lemercier- Goddard. Collection “Dialogues de Modernités.” (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2019).
• “Female Authorship.” In The Blackwell Companion to Renaissance Poetry, edited by Catherine Bates (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), 128-40.
• “Finding Desire in Windsor: Gender, Consumption, and Animality in Merry Wives,” The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays, ed. Phyllis Rackin and Evelyn Gajowski (Routledge, 2015).
• "Reading the Home: The Case of the English House-wife." Renaissance Paratexts. Eds. Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• "Literacy and the Domestic Arts." Huntington Library Quarterly. Special Issue, "The Textuality and Materiality of Reading in Early Modern England." Eds. Jennifer Richards and Fred Schurink 73:3 (2010): 383-412.
• "Distillation: Transformations in and out of the Kitchen." Renaissance Food. Ed. Joan Fitzpatrick(Ashgate Press, 2010), 89-104.
• "Women in the Household." The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing. Ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 97-109.
• "Just a Spoonful of Sugar: Syrup and Domesticity in Early Modern England." Modern Philology 104:2 (2006): 149-72.
• "De-generation: Editions, Offspring, and Romeo and Juliet." From Performance to Print in Early Modern England. Eds. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 152-72.
• "Shakespearean Jell-O: Mortality and Mutability in the Kitchen." Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 6:1 (2006): 41-50.
• "Editors in Love: Textual and Authorial Desire and Romeo and Juliet." The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen (Blackwell, 2005).
• "Dramatic Authorship and Print." Writers of the English Renaissance, Vol. 1. Ed. Garrett Sullivan and Andrew Hadfield, (Oxford, 2005).
• "Blood in the Kitchen: Violence and Early Modern Domestic Work." Women and Violence in the Early Modern Period: Essays in Honor of Paul Jorgensen. Eds. Linda Woodbridge and Sharon Beehler (University of Arizona Press, 2002), 329-60.
• "Why Does Puck Sweep?: Fairylore, Merry Wives and Social Struggle." Shakespeare Quarterly, 52 (2001): 67-106.
• "'Household Stuff': The Sexual Politics of Domesticity and the Advent of English Comedy." The Journal of English Literary History (ELH) 65 (1998): 1-45.
• "Renaissance National Husbandry: Gervase Markham and the Publication of England." The Sixteenth Century Journal 27 (1996): 767-85.
• "Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy." The Journal of English Literary History (ELH) 58 (1991): 35-62.