Kaara Peterson
Biography
Dr. Peterson's research and teaching focuses mainly on the UK, where you’ll find her visiting museum collections, libraries, and writing about UK and also US theater productions. A recent recipient of fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, she is the director of the Literary London program and likes a good country house murder mystery.
Education
- BA, MA, Ph.D., Boston University
Research Interests
Dr. Peterson's work explores Renaissance culture, especially material/visual culture and art history, medical history, and literature, especially Shakespeare, and non-Shakespearean theater. She has a secondary interest in detective/mystery/Gothic fiction.
Courses Taught
- Shakespeare
- Shakespeare and Film
- Revenge Tragedy from the Oresteia to Gone Girl
- The Afterlife of Hamlet and Ophelia
- Detective/Mystery Fiction (especially in London)
- Short Story
Publications
Books
- A Natural History of the Elizabethan Age: Early Modern Culture and the “Virgin Queen” (under review)
- Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance. Ed. Amy Kenny and Kaara L. Peterson. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2021.
- The Afterlife of Ophelia. Ed. Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012.
- Popular Medicine, Hysterical Disease, and Social Controversy in Shakespeare’s England. Ashgate, 2010.
- Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage. Ed. Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson. Ashgate, 2004. Reprinted, Routledge, 2016
- “Elizabeth I’s Mettle: Metallic/Medallic Portraits.” Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance. Ed. Kenny and Peterson, 2021. Chapter 7.
- “Hamlet’s Touch of Picture.” Hamlet: The State of Play. The Arden Shakespeare. Ed. Sonia Massai and Lucy Munro. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Chapter 1.
- “Oxford University’s ‘Pendant Pearl’ Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I,” online article published 3 May 2019, Centre for Early Modern Studies, Oxford University
- https://earlymodern.web.ox.ac.uk/kaara-peterson...
- “Picturing Elizabeth I’s Triumph of Melancholy.” English Literary Renaissance 48.1 (Winter 2018): 1-40.
- “Medical Discourses of Virginity and the Bed-Trick in Shakespearean Drama.” Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science. Ed. Howard J. Marchitello, Evelyn Tribble. London: Macmillan, 2017. 377-99.
- “The Ring’s the Thing: Elizabeth’s Virgin Knot Eternal and All’s Well That Ends Well.” Studies in Philology 113.1 (Winter 2016): 101-31.
- "Elizabeth I’s Virginity and the Body of Evidence: Jonson’s Notorious Crux.” Renaissance Quarterly 68.3 (Fall 2015): 840-71.
- “The Afterlives of Ophelia.” Introduction. The Afterlife of Ophelia. Ed. Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012.
- “Historica Passio: King Lear, Early Modern Medicine, and Editorial Practice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 57.1 (Spring 2006): 1-22.
- “Re-Anatomizing Melancholy: Burton and the Logic of Humoralism.” Textual Healing: Essays on
- Medieval and Early Modern Medicine. Ed. Elizabeth Lane Furdell. Brill, 2005. 139-67.
- “Shakespearean Revivifications: Early Modern Undead.” Shakespeare Studies XXXII (Fall 2004): 40-66.
- “Performing Arts: Hysterical Disease, Exorcism, and Shakespeare’s Theater,” in Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage. 3-30.
- “Fluid Economies: Portraying Shakespeare’s Hysterics.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 34.1 (May 2001). 35-59. Reprinted in Shakespearean Criticism: The Two Noble Kinsmen, vol. 190. Ed. Catherine C. DiMercurio. Gen. Ed. Gordon McMullan. Layman Poupard/Gale, 2019.
- “Framing Ophelia: Representation and the Pictorial Tradition.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 31.3 (September 1998). 1-24. Reprinted in Shakespearean Criticism Yearbook 1998: A Selection of the Year’s Most Noteworthy Studies of William Shakespeare’s Plays and Poetry 48. Gale, 2000.
Grants and Awards
- Burghley Fellow, Cambridge University, St. John's College (2024)
- Plumer Visiting Research Fellow and Visiting Fellow, Centre for Early Modern Studies, Oxford University (Spring 2019)
- Research Grant, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, UK (2016)
- Fellow, Countway Library of Medicine, Center for the History of Medicine, Harvard University (Spring 2013)
- Visiting Fellow, Joan Nordell Visiting Fellowship, Houghton Library, Harvard University (Fall 2006)
- Summer Seminar Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities, "Literature and the Visual Arts," Richard Wendorf, director, Summer Seminar (2004)
Additional Academic Information
Professor Peterson is currently working on a new project about the construction of virginity in the age of Elizabethan art, medicine, and culture, in addition to compiling the comprehensive volume Ophelia: A Visual-Cultural History.
She is also working on a creative non-fictional/cultural history of 70s-80s New York.