New York University

Gallatin School of Individualized Study

• Schedule
• Participant Bios
• Paper Abstracts

Elizabeth Blake

Elizabeth Blake is a Ph.D. student in English at New York University, studying medieval and early modern literature, specifically early modern drama. Her research interests include theories of materiality and embodiment, and the history and philosophy of science and technology. Beginning in the fall of 2008, she will be one of two graduate coordinators for the Colloquium on Early Literature and Culture in English (CELCE) in the department of English and American literature at NYU, and planning a conference themed around “Early Materialities.”

Paper title/topic: “Renaissance Dildos and Accessories: The Functions of Early Modern Strap-Ons”

Virginia Cox

Virginia Cox has a B.A. and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University and she worked at the Universities of Edinburgh, University College London, and Cambridge before taking up her current post as professor of Italian at New York University. Her main fields of research are 15th- and 16th-century Italian literature, history of rhetoric, and gender studies. Her publications include The Renaissance Dialogue (1992), The Rhetoric of Cicero in its Medieval and Early Renaissance Tradition (2006; coedited with John O. Ward), and Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400-1650 (2008). She has also edited and translated texts by Moderata Fonte and Maddalena Campiglia for the University of Chicago Press’s series “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe.”

Chair

Juliet Fleming

Juliet Fleming is associate professor in the Department of English at NYU and has previously held positions at the University of Southern California and at Cambridge University. She is the author of Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Reaktion and the University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), and is currently working to complete a book on Renaissance writing practices.

Chair

Will Fisher

Will Fisher is associate professor of English at Lehman College, The City University of New York. His book, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2006 and won the award for the best book of that year from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.

Paper title/topic: “‘Had it a codpiece, ’twere a man indeed’: The Codpiece as a Constitutive Accessory”

Beth Holman

Beth Holman earned her B.A. in biological anthropology from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. As an art historian, she has taught Renaissance art, architecture, and decorative arts at the State University of New York, Vassar College, NYU, the Cooper-Hewitt Masters Program, and the Bard Graduate Center (where she also served as acting chair). Holman has organized numerous sessions and conferences on the decorative arts, including “Bringing the Renaissance Home: Domestic Arts and Design in Renaissance Italy c.1400 - c.1600,” “The Renaissance/Early Modern Home as Cultural Artifact” (with Marty Elsky), and “Benvenuto Cellini: Artist, Artisan, Author.” She also edited a special issue of the journal Studies in the Decorative Arts on the historiography of decorative arts. Her book on Cellini and intellectual property of design is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Paper title/topic: “Papal Dress and Accessories in the Renaissance”

Ann Rosalind Jones

Ann Rosalind Jones, the Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor of Comparative Literature at Smith College, is the author of The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1600; editor and translator, with Margaret Rosenthal, of The Poems and Selected Letters of Veronica Franco; and, with Peter Stallybrass, author of Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. She recently completed, with Margaret Rosenthal, an illustrated translation of Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (Thames and Hudson, 2008). Her current research project is a study of 16th-century printed costume books from France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Paper title/topic: “Busks and Bodices: The Bound Renaissance Body”

Natasha Korda

Natasha Korda, associate professor of English at Wesleyan University, is author of Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) and coeditor of Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2002). She is currently finishing a book entitled Labors Lost: Women's Work on the Early Modern English Stage.

Paper title/topic: “‘Stiff and Starchy’ Accessories: Weaving Alien Women’s Work into the Fabric of Early Modern Material Culture”

Joseph Loewenstein

Joseph Loewenstein is professor of English and comparative literature, and he directs the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities at Washington University, where he has been since 1981. As a specialist in Renaissance literature and culture, he has authored two recent books on the history of intellectual property and the rise of “possessive authorship.” Currently, Loewenstein is one of the editors of the Oxford edition of the collected works of Edmund Spenser; he is also writing a study of the material props of identity in the English Renaissance tentatively entitled Accessorizing Hamlet.

Paper title/topic: “Hamlet’s Mourning Garment”

Richard McCoy

Richard McCoy is professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center, The City University of New York. McCoy has authored three books, entitled Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation; Rites of Knighthood: Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry; and Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia. Currently, he is working on a book that aims to study the links between Reformation theology and performance theory in Shakespeare’s plays.

Chair

Bella Mirabella

Bella Mirabella, associate professor of literature and humanities at the Gallatin School, New York University, specializes in Renaissance studies with a focus on drama, theatre, performance, and gender. She is the coeditor of Left Politics and the Literary Profession and has written articles on women, performance, and sexual politics in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, including “Mute Rhetorics: Women, Dance, and the Gaze in Renaissance England” and “‘Quacking Delilahs’: Female Mountebanks in Early Modern England and Italy.” Her current work includes an analysis of the social function of accessories, particularly the handkerchief in early modern Europe. She is also editing a collection of essays on accessories in the Renaissance. Since 1987, Professor Mirabella has directed and taught Gallatin’s Renaissance humanities seminar in Florence, Italy.

Paper title/topic: “Embellishing Herself with a Cloth: The Double Life of the Handkerchief”

Karen Newman

Karen Newman is professor of English at New York University. Until 2006 she was university professor and professor of English and comparative literature at Brown University. She has written widely on Shakespeare and Renaissance letters and culture and is the author of several books, including Shakespeare’s Rhetoric of Comic Character (Methuen, 1985), Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1991), Fetal Positions, Individualism, Science, Visuality (Stanford, 1996), Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris (Princeton, 2007) and Essaying Shakespeare, forthcoming in 2009 from University of Minnesota Press.

Paper title/topic: “Accessories and the Sartorial Economy of Secondariness”

Karen Raber

Karen Raber is associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi, and author of Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama (2001), as well as numerous essays on early modern women writers. She is coeditor with Ivo Kamps of William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: Texts and Contexts (2004), with Treva J. Tucker of The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline and Identity in the Early Modern World (2005), and with Tom Hallock and Ivo Kamps of the forthcoming Early Modern Ecocriticism: From Shakespeare to the Florentine Codex (2008).

Paper title/topic: “Chains of Pearls: Gender, Property, Identity”

Adam Smyth

Adam Smyth specializes in early modern literature. His book, Profit and Delight: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640-1682 (2004), considers the movement of texts, from elite manuscript readers to consumers of cheap, popular print, exploring how, and with what consequences, texts altered as they made their journeys to new readers. His edited collection of essays, Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England (Boydell and Brewer), was also published in 2004. He is currently completing a new monograph entitled Writing Identities: Life-Writing in England, 1550-1700. He has also published articles in English Literary Renaissance, Studies in Philology, Huntington Library Quarterly, The Seventeenth Century, and elsewhere.

Paper title/topic: “Functional Ornaments: Early Modern Scissors”

Peter Stallybrass

Peter Stallybrass is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and professor of English and of comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs an interdisciplinary seminar on the history of material texts. He is the author, with Allon White, of The Politics and Poetics of Transgression and of the essays translated into Portuguese in O Casaco de Marx: Roupas, Memória, Dor; with Ann Rosalind Jones, of Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory; and, with James Green, of Benjamin Franklin, Printer and Writer. His current project is entitled Printing for Manuscript, The 2006 Rosenbach Lectures (University of Pennsylvania Press).

Respondent

Jane Tylus

Jane Tylus is professor of Italian studies and comparative literature, and the vice provost for academic affairs at New York University. She is the author of Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance (1993); The Sacred Poetry of Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici (2001); Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World, coedited with Margaret Beissinger and Susanne L. Wofford (1999); The Signs of Others: The Writings of Catherine of Siena (2008); and Early Modern Masculinities in Italy and Spain, coedited with Gerry Milligan (2008).

Paper title/topic: “The Garment of Translation”

Evelyn Welch

Evelyn Welch is professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London and academic dean of the arts faculty. She is the author of Art in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 2000) and Shopping in the Renaissance (Yale, 2005), which was the joint winner of the Wolfson Prize for History in 2005. From 2000 to 2004, she ran a large collaborative research project funded by the Getty Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the results of which have now been published as The Material Renaissance (Manchester, 2007). Professor Welch now leads a £5.5 million project on behalf of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, “Beyond Text: Performances, Sounds, Images, Objects,” which will finish in 2012.

Paper title/topic: “Perfumed Buttons and Scented Gloves: Smelling Things in Renaissance Italy”