Situating Shakespeare Pedagogy in Us Higher Education: Social Justice and Institutional Contexts

On college and university campuses across the United States, scholar-teachers and their students find themselves in conditions of both real threat and tremendous possibility. Building on the recent surge of interest in equitable pedagogy within the field of Shakespeare and Renaissance literary studies, Situating Shakespeare Pedagogy in U.S. Higher Education makes a case for anchoring our teaching in these institutional power dynamics that have historically contributed to systemic injustice and continue to affect our work on a daily basis. Each of the contributors to this collection speaks directly to the intersection between their own identities, the lived experiences of their students, and the particular qualities of the institutions where they teach--including student demographics, curricular requirements, geographical location, and comparative levels of administrative support for implementing social justice approaches. From this perspective, they provide hope and practical guidance for scholar-educators who want to meet our students where they are.

Marissa Greenberg is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Metropolitan Tragedy: Genre, Justice, and the City in Early Modern England (Toronto, 2015) and the co-editor (with Rachel Trubowitz) of Milton's Moving Bodies (Northwestern, forthcoming). She has published widely on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, theatrical adaptation, social justice pedagogy and bodily motions in early modern English literature and culture. She is currently writing a book about the ways contemporary authors and artists adapt John Milton's works to advance today's movements for gender equity, racial justice, disability rights and religious freedom.

Elizabeth Williamson has served as both a faculty member and an academic dean at The Evergreen State College. She is the author of The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama (Ashgate, 2009) and the co-editor (with Jane Hwang Degenhardt) of Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage (Ashgate, 2011). Her work has appeared in Wiley Blackwell's New Companion to Renaissance Drama, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Borrowers and Lenders, English Literary Renaissance, and Studies in English Literature.