Dr. Vanessa Corredera

Education

Ph.D. Northwestern University
M.A. Northwestern University
B.A. Andrews University

Interests

Shakespeare
Early Modern Drama
Adaptation and Appropriation
Women’s and Gender Studies
Race and Ethnic Studies

Courses

• ENG 2301 British Literature
• ENG 4320 English Drama to 1642
• ENG 4324 Shakespeare: Selected Plays
• ENG 5324 Sixteenth-Century English Literature: Seminar

Bio

Vanessa I. Corredera is interested in early modern drama, most especially in examining the afterlives of Shakespeare’s canon in modernity. Her scholarship and pedagogy focus most on Shakespeare in contemporary performance, adaptation and appropriation, and popular culture in both the U.S. and U.K, combining literary history and cultural studies to interrogate the race and gender work early modern drama advances both in the past and today.

Her monograph, Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello in Post-Racial America (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), turns to versions of Othello created between 2008-2016 to analyze how these Othellos manifest or contest the racial frameworks popularized in America’s so-called post-racial era, frameworks, she argues, that result in either anti-black or anti-racist versions of Othello. Her monograph-in-progress investigates how Black, Indigenous, and People of Color theatermakers appropriate Shakespeare to challenge and re-write the harmful racial and gendered scripts that pressure their histories and present. Each chapter conceptualizes a strategy by which these artists and their works rescript Shakespeare while attendantly rescripting longstanding conceptualizations of race and gender. She is also the co-editor of Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation (Routledge, 2023) and is finishing work on two forthcoming edited collections, Shakespeare, Race and Anglophone Popular Culture (Bloomsbury) and Shakespeare and the Performance of Exile (ACMRS Press). She is also beginning work on Othello: A Critical Reader (Bloomsbury). 

Her scholarship has appeared in various journals, including Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, as well as a number of edited collections, such as Shakespeare/Play (Bloomsbury), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, and The Ethical Implications of Shakespeare in Performance and Appropriation (Edinburgh). She has served as a General Editor for Borrowers and Lenders and is currently a General Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly. She is also a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. 

She enjoys hiking, reading, exploring local food scenes, singing, amateur photography, and traveling with her family.