Department of English
MICHELLE DOWD
Title: Assistant Professor
E-Mail: mmdowd@uncg.edu
Phone: 334-5384
Office: 3123 MHRA
Michelle Dowd (PhD Columbia University) was a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Fordham University before joining the faculty at UNCG in 2004. She specializes in early modern literature, with concentrations in Tudor and Stuart Drama (particularly Shakespeare) and early modern women’s writing. Her additional teaching and research interests include early modern theater culture, dramatic genres, feminist theory and gender studies, economic criticism, and early modern religious culture.
Her essays have been published or are forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, the Shakespearean International Yearbook, and elsewhere. With Julie A. Eckerle, she is the co-editor of Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2007), a collection of critical essays that examines the ways in which early modern women writers creatively deploy and combine generic structures to produce diverse, historically specific narratives of the self.
Professor Dowd was awarded a 2006-2007 Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Long-Term Fellowship at the Huntington Library in support of her first monograph, Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, which is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan. This book investigates literature’s engagement with the social and gendered conflicts of early modern England by examining the narratives that seventeenth-century dramatists and women writers created to describe the lives of working women. Analyzing texts by such authors as William Shakespeare, Hannah Woolley, Thomas Heywood, Anne Clifford, and others, the project considers several types of work—including service, wetnursing, and housework—that changed significantly during the seventeenth century, generating new literary formulations of women’s economic, political, and religious authority.
Professor Dowd is currently at work on a second monograph, tentatively titled Delinquent Pedigrees: Lineage and Spatial Practice on the Early Modern Stage. This project examines the ways in which early modern drama employs narratological and physical formulations of staged space to explore deviations in patrilineality and to interrogate the hierarchical relationships implied by hereditary systems of inheritance.