The Department of English Language and Literature welcomes you to a talk by Dr. Sarah-Gray Lesley:
“Shakespeare’s Politics of Edibility: White English Femininity and Titus Andronicus”
Date: Tuesday, March 3, 5:30 pm
Room: Humanities Seminar Room (H-232)
Abstract:
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England’s increased investments in global capitalism, colonialism, and the transatlantic slave trade came about in dialectical relation to nascent theories of English whiteness. This talk considers how the particular category of English white womanhood developed, in part, through the early modern playhouse. Theatre practitioners workshopped the idea that white women were the primary buyers and arbiters of the nation’s budding taste for international goods due to their status as the privileged bearers of white English children. Taking William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1590) as its central case study, this talk explores how staged representations of reproduction and consumption shaped interlocking fictions about gender, race, and nation through the iconized white woman.
Bio:
Dr. Sarah-Gray Lesley is Lindsay Teaching Fellow in the Humanities and English Department at the University of Chicago. She completed her PhD in English Literature at the University of Chicago in 2024. Her work has appeared in journals such as Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 and Renaissance Drama. Her book project explores white femininity in early modern England.