Christine Varnado
Interests
Early Modern British literature; queer theory; literary theory; Shakespeare; Renaissance drama; psychoanalytic theory; 17th century print culture; premodern critical race studies; space/time/matter; new materialist and posthumanist thought; affect studies; historiography of sexuality; embodiment; and reproduction
Work in Progress
Queering Birth, Queering Death: Sex and the Problem of Life in Literature, Pre- and Post-Modern (monograph)
“Post-” (chapter) in Logomotives: Words that Change the Premodern World, ed. Marjorie Rubright and Stephen Speiss (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press)
“Aftercare” (afterword) in The Kinky Renaissance, ed. Joseph Gamble and Gillian Knoll (forthcoming from Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press)
The Queerness of Early Modern Death (essay collection, co-edited with Lauren Shohet; under review at Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare).
Selected Publications
Books
The Shapes of Fancy: Reading for Queer Desire in Early Modern Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). Open access on Manifold: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/the-shapes-of-fancy
Book interview in NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality, February 18, 2021: https://notchesblog.com/2021/02/18/the-shapes-of-fancy-reading-for-queer-desire-in-early-modern-literature/
Articles and Book Chapters
“The Quality of Whiteness: The Thief of Baghdad and The Merchant of Venice,” Exemplaria: Medieval/Early Modern/Theory 31.4 (2019): 245-269. Winner of the Shakespeare Association of America’s inaugural award for Methodologically Innovative Article, 2021.
“Queer Nature, or The Weather in Macbeth,” in Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality, ed. Goran Stanivukovic (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017): 177-195.
“Getting Used, and Liking It: Erotic Instrumentality in Philaster,” Renaissance Drama 44.1 (Spring 2016): 25-52.
“’Invisible Sex!’: What Looks Like the Act in Early Modern Drama?” in Sex Before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern Literature, eds. James Bromley and Will Stockton (University of Minnesota Press, 2013): 25-52.
Awards and Fellowships
Shakespeare Association of America Huntington Library Fellowship, 2023.
Huntington Library Short-Term Fellowships, 2020 and 2023.
UB Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship, 2021-2022.
Shakespeare Association of America Innovative Article prize, for “The Quality of Whiteness: The Thief of Baghdad and The Merchant of Venice” (Exemplaria 2019), 2021.
OVPRED Seed Money in the Arts and Humanities Grants, 2018 and 2024.
Affiliations
Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies
Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
Humanities Institute – Queer Studies Research Workshop
Gender Institute