- Associate Professor of English, Macalester College
Penelope Geng is an associate professor of English specializing in early modern literature, Shakespeare, law and literature, religion, and disability. Her book Communal Justice in Shakespeare’s England: Drama, Law, and Emotion (2021) argues for the vital work of drama in preserving a culture of participatory justice, communal care, and lay magistracy at a time when the law was becoming professionalized.
Her next project, provisionally titled Disabled by Law traces the legacy of seventeenth-century property law on modern notions of able-bodied citizenship—and the surprising ways that ideology was (and continues to be) contested by the literary imagination. She is the co-founder of Uncommon Bodies, a Twin Cities-based research workshop devoted to sharing knowledge about disability theory, aesthetics, and pedagogy. At Macalester, she teaches classes such as “Shakespeare,” “Once upon a Crime” (an introduction to law and literature), “Major British Authors,” “Disability in the English Renaissance,” and “Demonology.”
Experience
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–presentAssociate Professor of English, Macalester College
Education
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2014University of Southern California, PhD in English
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2006University of Chicago, MA in the Humanities
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2005University of Toronto, BA in English
Publications
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2021Communal Justice in Shakespeare's England: Drama, Law, and Emotion,
Professional Memberships
- Shakespeare Association of America
- Milton Society of America
- Renaissance Society of America
- Modern Language Association
Honours
Trustee, Shakespeare Association of America
Contact Penelope for
- General
- Media request
- Speaking request
- Consulting / Advising
- Research collaboration
- Research supervision
- Location: Saint Paul, Minnesota, U.S.
- Website
- Article Feed
- ORCID
- Joined
