Current Organizers:
Alicia Andrzejewski is a PhD student in the English program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She holds an MA from Appalachian State University. She is a scholar of early modern literature and culture, queer and feminist theory, and the medical humanities. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in the peer-reviewed journals Shakespeare Studies and The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, as well as the online publications Synapsis and Visible Pedagogy. As a PhD candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, she will defend her dissertation “Queer Pregnancy in Shakespeare’s Plays” in March of 2019. She holds an MA from Appalachian State University. She is a senior writing fellow at New York City College of Technology.
Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabresi specializes in Comparative Renaissance literature; her particular interests lie in book history, early modern drama, and women’s cultural production from 1450-1650. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2003, with a dissertation on the typography of the early modern printed play. From 2004 to 2007, she was a Haarlow-Cotsen Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University and an Associate Fellow in 2007-2008. She is currently Assistant Professor of Literature at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Margaret Mikesell, Professor Emerita at John Jay College CUNY, was a member of both the English and the Humanities and Justice Departments until her retirement. Her research interests concern early modern gender. She has studied various aspects of that broad subject in didactic treatises on women, in selected plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and in the connections between didactic and literary texts. Her current project is on misogyny in Hamlet.
Susan O’Malley, Professor Emerita, CUNY, was a member of the English Department at Kingsborough Community College and the Liberal Studies MA, at the Graduate Center. Since retirement she has worked with the UN NGO Committee on the Status of Women which she currently chairs. Her research interests were with early modern cultural studies, particularly with pamphlet literature about women. Lately she has been writing on films of Macbeth and King Lear and the influence (or lack of influence) of the women’s movement and feminist theory.
Past Organizers:
Cristina León Alfar joined the organizing committee in Fall 2010. She is Associate Professor of Shakespeare, late 16th and early 17th century English drama, early modern English women writers, and feminist theory at Hunter College, CUNY. Her research interests include Early Modern English drama, particularly Shakespeare, and the intersections between literature, culture, gender, law, and politics. You can learn more about her work on MLA-Humanities Commons.
Margaret Ferguson was a visiting professor at Columbia at the time of SSWR’s founding. She went to the University of Colorado shortly thereafter and recently retired from the University of California/Davis.
Joan Hartman was a founding member of the Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance, holds a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College, an M.A. from Duke University, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She has taught at Washington College, Harvard University, Wellesley College, Connecticut College, Queens College, Staten Island Community College, and the College of Staten Island. She has published on early modern Englishwomen, the Earl of Clarendon, and John Milton as well as on feminist issues, curricular and professional issues, and teaching writing. She served on the Modern Language Association’s Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession from 1973-76 and cochaired it in 1974-75. She served twice on the Delegate Assembly and once on Delegate Assembly Nominating Committee. And from 1985 through 1988, while chair of the Department of English at the College of Staten Island, she served on the Executive Committee of the Association of Departments of English.
Her feminist publications include Women in Print I: Opportunities for Women’s Studies Research in Language and Literature and Women in Print II: Opportunities for Women’s Studies Publication in Language and Literature (New York, 1982) and (En)Gendering Knowledge: Feminists in Academe (Knoxville, TN, 1991), all three collections of essays coedited with Ellen Messer-Davidow. She also coedited, with Adele Seeff, Structures and Subjectivities: Attending to Early Modern Women (Newark, DE, 1991), papers from the 2003 Attending to Early Modern Women conference. As an editor of The Norton Reader (from the 5th to the 10th eds.) she was particularly attentive to increasing its representation of essays by women.
Emily Sherwood was a member of the organizing committe for SSWR from 2008-2014. She is Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries where she collaborates with faculty and students on digital research projects. Prior to joining UofR, Emily was the Assistant Director of Digital Pedagogy and Scholarship and a Faculty Teaching Associate in English at Bucknell University. She is an alum of the CLIR/Educause Leading Change Institute (2016) and the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellows program (2014). Emily holds a doctorate in English from the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Betty S. Travitsky holds a PhD in English from St. John’s University.
Her publications concern early-modern women writers and early-modern
portrayals of women. She is currently teaching part-time for Adelphi
University, completing an update of her OBO bibliography, and working on
an essay on the witch.