Penelope Geng
Associate Professor, English and Creative Writing
Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama, British Literature c.1500-1700, Law and Literature, Religion and Literature; Affect and Emotions, Disability Studies, History of Medicine, Race and Property Law
Old Main 202
[email protected]
she/her/hers
Penelope Geng is 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.”
Areas of Study
- Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama
- British Literature c.1500-1700
- Law and Literature
- Religion and Literature
- Affect and Emotions
- Disability Studies
- History of Medicine
- Race and Property Law
Professor Geng will be on leave for the Academic Year 2025-2026
Books
Shakespeare, William. Richard II. Cambridge Shakespeare Editions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Expected completion in 2028)
Communal Justice in Shakespeare’s England: Drama, Law, and Emotion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021.
Selected Essays and Articles
Co-authored with Andrew Bozio. “Whiteness as Knowingness: Race and Intellectual Disability in Shakespeare’s Othello.” Ed. Alice Equestri. Shaping Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025. 263-85.
“The Mad Butler of Gray’s Inn: Service, Mental Disability, and the Limits of Institutional Care,” Ed. Jackie Watson and Emma Rhatigan. Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court: Law, Literature, and Identity. Cham: Palgrave, 2025. 99-119.
“Against White Cripistemology: Seeing Race and Global Disability in King Lear.” Ed. Katherine Schaap Williams. Shakespearean International Yearbook: Disability Performance and Global Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 2024. 160-82.
“Dressing to Transgress: Aesthetic Matching, Historical Costumers of Color, and the Restorying of Institutional Spaces.” Situating Shakespeare Pedagogy in US Higher Education: Social Justice and Institutional Contexts. Ed. Marissa Greenberg and Elizabeth Williamson. Edinburgh University Press. 2024. 126-43. Open access: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/jj.9941140.14.
“Trial by Jury in Early Modern England.” The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World. Ed. Kristen Poole: topics ed. Wendy Hyman. 2023. Published here: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367347093-RERW39-1
“The English Inns of Court.” The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World. Ed. Kristen Poole; topics ed. Wendy Hyman. 2023. Published here: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367347093-RERW70-1
“Jurisprudence by Aphorisms: Francis Bacon and the ‘Uses’ of Small Forms.” Law, Culture and the Humanities. 18.3 (2022). First published Jan. 31, 2019.
“On Judges and the Art of Judicature: Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2.” Studies in Philology 114.1 (2017): 97-123.
“Before the Right to Remain Silent: The Examinations of Anne Askew and Elizabeth Young.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 43.3 (2012): 667-679.
“‘He Only Talks’: Arruntius and the Formation of Interpretive Communities in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus.” The Ben Jonson Journal 18.1 (2011): 126-140.
Selected Book Reviews
Loftis, Sonya Freeman. Shakespeare and Disability Studies. Oxford Shakespeare Topics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Renaissance Quarterly 76, no. 2 (2023): 797-99. doi:10.1017/rqx.2023.298.
Katherine Schaap Williams. Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021. Modern Philology. Published here: journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/722265
Winston, Jessica. Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. The American Historical Review 129:2 (2024):837–8. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae140.
Selected Fellowships and Grants
The Huntington Library, Louise Ritchie Fellowship, 2025.
ACMRS RaceB4Race Second Book Institute, 2023 and 2025.
Racial Justice Project Fund for “Uncommon Bodies” Symposium, Macalester College, 2023-24.
Paul O. Kristeller Fellowship, Renaissance Society of America, 2022.
UMN Center for Premodern Studies, Research Workshop Grant for “Uncommon Bodies” (year 1, 2, 3, and 4) with Jennifer Row (French), 2019-present. Twitter @uncommonbodies.
Macalester, Itzkowitz Solon Warde Grant for Course Development, “Once upon a Crime,” 2020.
The Huntington Library, Francis Bacon Foundation Fellowship, 2019.
The Huntington Library, Francis Bacon Foundation Fellowship, 2014.
Mellon Academy for Advanced Study in the Renaissance Research Fellowship, 2014.
USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, Dissertation Fellowship, 2012-13.
Links
Personal Website: penelopegeng.com
Education
BA (Honors) in English: University of Toronto
MA in Humanities: University of Chicago
MA in English: University of Southern California
PhD in English: University of Southern California