DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Biography

Wendy Wall (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania). I am a scholar of early modern literature and culture whose work spans poetry, drama, gender and sexuality, women’s writing, food studies, and the history of media—from manuscript to early print to digital forms. My forthcoming book Cosmic Matter: Hester Pulter and the Early Modern World (UPenn Press, 2027) will be the first scholarly book devoted to the intellectually ambitious works of a fairly recently discovered and talented 17th-century writer, one who grappled and poetically experimented with topics ranging from science, to religious faith, to loss, to politics.  I am co-creator, with Leah Knight, of the prize-winning The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, an innovative open-access edition that makes Pulter’s poetry freely accessible and radically reimagines what scholarly editing can be.

In general, my scholarship foregrounds gender as I explore how literature offers us special insight into how people have explored deeply held beliefs, scientific changes, identities, powerful emotions and the textures of everyday life. Through these investigations, we can newly see the early modern past world as vivid, experimental, productively alien and yet relevant to understanding issues today. Previous books include 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)—a finalist for the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize—and Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). My teaching includes classes on contemporary Global Shakespeare, Renaissance love poetry, “Journeys” (from The Odyssey to Octavia Butler’s futuristic fiction), and Shakespeare and Film.

Throughout my career, I have been committed to the humanities and to public humanities work—including collaborations with the Northwestern Prison Education Program, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Newberry Library, Chicago Humanities Festival, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Serving as the director of the Kaplan Institute at Northwestern allowed me to think about humanities work and teaching across Northwestern and beyond. I am also a former Trustee and President of the Shakespeare Association of America and co-editor of Renaissance Drama.

My research and teaching have been recognized with numerous honors: I have been awarded the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence, the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar (where I served as an ambassador for the liberal arts at colleges throughout the US), the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Folger Shakespeare Library. My publications span a wide range of topics—from editorial theory and authorship to domesticity; from national identity to Shakespeare’s plays; from digital publishing to recipes, and, yes, even Jell-O.

Specializations

Drama & Performance, Early Modern Literature, Digital Humanities, Poetry & Poetics, History of the Book/Material Texts, Textual Editing, Gender & Sexuality 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.