ENG 339 • Shakespeare: Early Plays and Sonnets• Shakespearean Transformations •
From combustible love to gender-bending transformations, from distilled roses to medicinal cannibalism, and from mistaken identities to twin sympathies, this course will explore the nuances of transformation in Shakespeare’s poetry and early plays. Readings will include Shakespeare’s sonnets, “The Turtle and the Phoenix,” and the plays As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, and Twelfth Night.
• Recipes and Experiments of Science and Magic in Shakespeare’s England •
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the rise of recipes for various remedies and healing arts following on the heels of new discoveries about the natural world. The early moderns were fascinated by the occult, or secret, properties of vegetable, animal, and mineral ingredients as well as the ability to manipulate those properties. The idea of human art improving upon nature was both sanctioned and feared because of the fine line between “natural magic” and more insidious forms of diabolical manipulation, such as witchcraft. Recipes—or receipts, as they were called—could help you to heal a wound, beautify your face, reveal invisible writing, or make a curse. In this course, we will explore the early modern recipe archive to articulate the connections between questions of experimentation, imagination, gender, race, and performativity as they manifested in the dramatic and poetic literature of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Courses Taught
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
ENG 211 • Major British Authors • Imagining New Worlds
ENG 339 • Shakespeare: Early Plays and Sonnets • Science, Symbols, & Strangers
ENG 340 • Shakespeare: Later Plays • Shakespeare’s Mystical Futures
ENG 340 • Shakespeare: Later Plays • Shakespeare’s Others
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
ENGL 146 • Bio/Techno/Magical Thresholds from Shakespeare to Stranger Things
ENGL 123 • Truths, Experiments, and Fiction: The Stories of Humanity