Faculty Profiles: Jane Hwang Degenhardt
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Associate Professor Jane Hwang Degenhardt received her B.A. from Hamilton College and her Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching interests include Shakespeare, non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama, gender and race studies, Asian American literature, and African American literature. Professor Degenhardt’s book, Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (2010), explores representations of Christian-Muslim encounter in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Focusing on the stage’s treatment of religious conversion as a sexual seduction, it demonstrates how gender was a key factor in exposing interconnections between religious identities and proto-racial distinctions. It also looks at how the threat of Christian conversion to Islam was framed within a domestic culture of Protestant reform, ultimately revealing an intersection between the stage’s engagement of Reformation controversies and its construction of Islam as a proto-racial category. Professor Degenhardt has published articles in ELH, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Modern Fiction Studies. Her explorations of the relationship between popular drama and religious culture have led to a collection of essays coedited with Elizabeth Williamson, titled Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage (2011). A new research project on Shakespeare considers “outlying” plays that do not fit the traditional genres into which Shakespeare’s plays are normally categorized. Rather than approach these generic outliers in the limited context of Shakespeare’s canon, this study places these plays in a broader history of theatrical performance and dramatic genre. |
