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Kaara Peterson
Professor Emeritus of English

Kaara L. Peterson, Ph.D.

Contact Info

Literary London Program

Biography

Dr. Peterson's research and teaching focuses mainly on Early Modern Studies in the UK, where you’ll find her visiting museum collections, libraries, and writing about UK and also US theater productions--she also likes a good locked room murder mystery. A recent recipient of fellowships at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, she is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London.

Education

  • BA, MA, Ph.D., Boston University, English (2001)

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
Selected Articles and Book Chapters
  • “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

  • Visiting Fellow, Warburg Institute, University of London (2026-27)
  • Research Grant, Society of Antiquaries London (Fall 2025)
  • Research Grant, American Philosophical Society (Fall 2024)
  • 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.