Headshot of Rosemary Kegl.

Rosemary Kegl

Associate Professor

PhD, Cornell University

Office Location
318 Morey Hall

Research Overview

Rosemary Kegl is currently working on two book manuscripts. The first project, Tabloid Shakespeare at the 1934 Chicago World's Fair, focuses on 40-minute productions of Shakespeare’s plays at the fair’s Merrie England concession. Tabloid Shakespeare analyzes Merrie England, its reconstructed Globe Theatre, and the theater’s modified Elizabethan staging of the abbreviated plays. The second project, Revisiting Death in English Renaissance Drama: Apostrophe, Tragicomedy, and Utopia analyzes the considerable interpretive demands that staged death places on the plays’ characters and their English Renaissance audiences.

Research Interests

  • English Renaissance drama
  • Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing
  • Productions of Shakespeare in Britain and the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries
  • Theories of the aesthetic and of the utopian

Selected Publications

Book

  • The Rhetoric of Concealment: Figuring Gender and Class in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994)

Articles

  • “’Outdistancing the Past’: Shakespeare and American Education at the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair,” in Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance, ed. Coppelia Kahn, Heather Nathans, and Mimi Godfrey (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2011), 247-275
  • "Theaters, Households, and a 'Kind of History' in Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam," in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, ed. Anne Russell and Viviana Comensoli (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1999), 135-53 reprinted in Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700: Volume 6: Elizabeth Cary, edited by Karen Raber (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009) reprinted in Literary Criticism from 1400 to 1800, vol. 141, ed. Tom Schoenberg (Detroit: Gale Group, 2008)
  • "'[W]rapping togas over Elizabethan garb': Tabloid Shakespeare at the 1934 Chicago World's Fair,” in Renaissance Drama 28 (Summer 1997): 73-97, volume printed in 1999, special issue on the Spatial Properties of the Renaissance Stage
  • "'The World I Have Made': Margaret Cavendish, Feminism, and The Blazing-World," in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 119-41
  • "Women's Preaching, Absolute Property, and the Cruel Sufferings (For the Truth's Sake) of Katharine Evans and Sarah Chevers," in Women's Studies 24:1-2 (1994): 51-83, special double issue on Gender, Literature, and the English Revolution
  • "'The Adoption of Abominable Terms': The Insults that Shape Windsor's Middle Class," in ELH 61:2 (Summer 1994): 253-78 reprinted in Shakespeare Criticism Yearbook 28 (1994), ed. Michael Magoulias (Detroit: Gale Research, 1995)
  • "'Those Terrible Aproches': Sexuality, Social Mobility, and Resisting the Courtliness of Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie," in English Literary Renaissance 20:2 (Spring 1990): 179-208
  • "'Joyning my Labour to my Pain': The Politics of Labor in Marvell's Mower Poems," in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), 89-118

Teaching

Recent teaching:

  • Rochester, NY (ENGL 103)
  • British Literature 1 (ENGL 113)
  • English Renaissance Literature (ENGL 207/407)
  • Renaissance Writing and Its Audiences: Greene, Shakespeare, Milton, Cavendish (ENGL 207/407)
  • Renaissance Drama (ENGL 208/408)
  • Shakespeare (ENGL 210/410)
  • Revenge Tragedies in the English Renaissance (ENGL 213/413)
  • Utopian and Dystopian Writing (ENGL 245/380/445)
  • The Utopian in English Renaissance Writing (ENGL 516)
  • What is the Aesthetic? (ENGL 552)

Honors

  • Folger Shakespeare Institute Short-Term Fellowship
  • Folger Shakespeare Institute Grant-in-Aid, to support participation in the Institute Colloquium, Puzzling Evidence
  • Butler Professor, Department of English, State University of New York at Buffalo (1999)
  • Newberry Library/National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
  • Newberry Library Short-Term Resident Fellowship
  • Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities/Mellon Dissertation Fellowship