Jane Hwang Degenhardt

Jane Hwang Degenhardt’s work focuses on early modern drama with particular interests in the effects of globalizing processes, historical and speculative understandings of “worlding,” and the intertwined histories of race, religion, and empire.

Professor Degenhardt is currently developing two new book projects. The first, provisionally titled “Shakespeare’s Speculative Worldmaking: Beyond Empire and Empiricism,” approaches Shakespeare’s plays as instruments of speculative imagination that employ theatrical fiction to challenge imperial notions of world and empirical ways of knowing. Professor Degenhardt’s second book project, written in collaboration with Henry S. Turner (Rutgers University), is tentatively titled “Shakespearean Cosmologies: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Experience.” Focused on the relationship between cosmology and aesthetic experience during the European Renaissance, this study advances a theory of “cosmological aesthetics” as an alternative to contemporary categories such as the “planetary” and the “global.”

Related publications include a co-written essay on how concepts of experience, race, and region inform Shakespeare’s response to early globalization in The Comedy of Errors (published in Exemplaria 33.2), an essay on worldly time scales, horizons, and counterfactual history in Antony and Cleopatra (published in SEL: Studies in English Literature 62.1), and a 2023 special issue of The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies on “Local Oceans / New Colonial Geographies,” coedited with Benjamin VanWagoner. Professor Degenhardt is also collaborating with Cyrus Mulready on a new edition of Pericles for Cambridge University Press.

Profession Degenhardt’s previous books include Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford University Press, 2022), Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh University Press, paperback 2015), and the collection Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage (coedited with Elizabeth Williamson; Routledge Press, 2011).

Professor Degenhardt teaches a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses on early modern literature as well as on contemporary speculative fiction and ethnic American literature. Her graduate teaching focuses on such topics as early modern theories of fiction and worldmaking, the history of posthumanism, literary histories of empire, race, and early capitalism, Shakespeare and social justice, and Renaissance theatricality and performance. In her undergraduate courses, she often places works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries in conversation with writers of color and takes a trans-historical approach to race, inter-generational trauma, and social justice. She has served as the Graduate Program Director and as the Director of Job Placement and is strongly committed to graduate advising. In 2022 she won the University Distinguished Graduate Mentoring Award.

Professor Degenhardt currently serves as the lead editor for English Literary Renaissance, a top journal for new research in early modern literature and culture. She is a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America and serves on the Seventeenth-Century Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association. She received her BA in English and Philosophy from Hamilton College and her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania.

• “Fictional Hypothesis, Lived Experience, and Re-worlding in The Tempest,” Experiential and Experimental Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, eds. James Kearney and Pavneet Aulakh (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming).
• “Theorizing the Horizon: From World to Worlds to Planetarity,” co-authored with Asha Nadkarni and Malcolm Sen, Decolonial Reconstellations in the Longue Durée, Vol. 2, eds. Laura Doyle and Mwangi wa Gῖthῖnji (Routledge Press, 2025).
• "Early Modern Race-Work: History Methodology and Politics," in The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, eds. Michelle Dowd and Tom Rutter (Bloomsbury, 2023).
• "Globability: The Virtue of Worlding," in Shakespeare and Virtue, eds. Julia Reinhard Lupton and Donovan Sherman (Cambridge UP, 2023).
• “Counter-Imperial Horizons in Antony and Cleopatra,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 62.1 (Winter 2022): 47-76, a themed issue edited by Joseph Campana and Ayesha Ramachandran.
• “Globe, World, Region: Experiencing the In-Between in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors,” coauthored with Henry S. Turner, Exemplaria 33.2 (2021): 158-83.
• “Performing the Sea: Fortune, Risk, and Audience Engagement in Pericles,” Renaissance Drama 49.1 (Spring 2020): 103-29.
• “Between Shakespeare, the World and Me,” The Rambling (January 26, 2019). https://the-rambling.com/2019/01/26/issue3-degenhardt/
• "The Reformation, Inter-imperial World History, and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus," PMLA 130.2 (2015): 401-11.
• “Purifying the Pursuit of Gold in Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West,” Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater, eds. Michelle Dowd, Ronda Arab, and Adam Zucker (Routledge, 2015), 152-68.
• “The Metatheatrical Mediterranean: Theatrical Contrivance and Miraculous Reunion,” Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean, eds. Barbara Fuchs and Emily Weissbourd (University of Toronto Press, 2015), 221-48.
• “Cracking the Mysteries of ‘China’: China(ware) in the Early Modern Imagination,” Studies in Philology 110.1 (Spring 2013): 133-68. 
• “Foreign Worlds,” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Kinney (Oxford University Press, 2011), 433-57.
• Introduction to Religion and Drama in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2011).
• “Catholic Prophylactics and Islam’s Sexual Threat: Preventing and Undoing Sexual Defilement in Massinger’s The Renegado,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.1 (Spring/Summer 2009): 62-92.
• “Situating the Essential Alien: Sui Sin Far’s Depiction of Chinese-White Marriage and the Exclusionary Logic of Citizenship,” Modern Fiction Studies 54.4 (Winter 2008): 654-88.
• “Virgin Martyrdom in Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr and the Contemporary Threat of Turning Turk,” ELH 73.1 (Spring 2006): 83-118.

• Shakespeare and Speculation
• Early Modern Theories of Fiction and World-making
• Shakespeare, Race, and Social Justice
• The Human, the Post-Human, and Race
• Early Modern Global Economy and Poetics of Fortune
• Renaissance Discourses of Fate, Fortune, and Human Will
• Global Renaissances: Transnationalism, Globalization, Inter-imperialism
• New Theoretical Directions in Shakespeare Studies

• Shakespeare
• Literature and Social Justice: An Integrated Experience Course
• Non-Humans in Shakespeare: Creatures, Monsters, Demons, and Fairies
• Narrating Trauma and Redemption
• Forms of Intimacy on the Early Modern Stage
• Encountering Islam in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
• Early Modern Drama on the Global Stage