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Jennifer Waldron

  • Associate Professor

Jennifer's Affiliations: Cultural Studies, European Studies Center, Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Vibrant Media Lab

Jen Waldron teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Shakespeare, early modern literature, the history of media, and intersections of words and images in theater, book history, and graphic novels. She advises graduate students working in those and adjacent fields as well as supervising undergraduate research projects through ASRA, the Honors College, and more. 

Waldron is the author of Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater, which reexamines secularization narratives about Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in light of Protestant investments in the sacramental and symbolic powers of the human body. Her current book project, Shakespeare and the Sense of Scale, takes up Shakespeare’s career-long exploration of the power of language to produce scalar effects, from concrete sensory experiences of space and time to complex models of collectivity and individuality. She recently published a book chapter, titled “Theatrical Experiments and Experiential Protestants: Shakespearean Iconoclasm in Love’s Labors Lost,” in Experiential and Experimental Knowledge on the Early Modern English Stage, edited by James Kearney and Pavneet Aulakh. Another essay, “From Stage to Manga Page: Scalar Mediation and Shakespeare’s Tempest,” came out in Shakespeare and Comics, a collection edited by Brandon Christopher and Jim Casey. Waldron is also co-editing (with Professor Caro Pirri) a new collection of essays on scale in the early modern period.

Waldron is also a member of the Gun Violence and its Histories collaborative, which recently won a Dietrich School Innovation Grant to create an undergraduate course and a teaching website. She co-founded the group with Pernille Roge (History), Chloe Hogg (French), and Chris Nygren (HAA) in 2018 after the Parkland and Tree of Life shootings. GVH sponsors an ongoing series of talks and workshops that seeks to use the tools we have as humanists and scholars of early modernity to participate productively in ongoing discussions around guns, gun culture, and gun violence.

Education & Training

  • PhD in English Literature (Renaissance Studies), Princeton University, 2004
  • MA, English Literature, New York University, 1999
  • BA, Comparative Literature (French, Spanish, and English), Oberlin College, 1991

Representative Publications

“Theatrical Experiments and Experiential Protestants: Shakespearean Iconoclasm in Love’s Labors Lost,” in Experiential and Experimental Knowledge on the Early Modern English Stage, ed. James Kearney and Pavneet Aulakh (Edinburgh University Press, 2026).

“From Stage to Manga Page: Scalar Mediation and Shakespeare’s Tempest,” came out in Shakespeare and Comics, ed. Brandon Christopher and Jim Casey (Bloomsbury, 2024).

“The Politics of Scale in Shakespeare’s Henry V: Fiction, History, Theater,” in “Theorizing Early Modern Fictions,” a special issue of English Literary Renaissance 52.3 (Autumn 2022)

“Introduction: Interstitial Fictions” (co-written with Wendy Beth Hyman), in “Theorizing Early Modern Fictions,” a special issue of English Literary Renaissance 52.3 (Autumn 2022)

“Then Face to Face: Timing Trust in Macbeth,” in Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama: Ethics, Performance, Philosophy, edited by Matthew Smith and Julia R. Lupton (Edinburgh University Press, 2019)

“Dead Likenesses and Sex Machines: Shakespearean Media Theory,” for A Handbook of Shakespeare, Gender, and Embodiment (Oxford, 2016), edited by Valerie Traub

Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

“Shakespeare, Synaesthesia, and Post-Reformation Phenomenology,” Criticism 54.3 (2013): 403–417, in a special issue on “Shakespeare and Phenomenology,” edited by James Kearney and Kevin Curran

Research Interests

Shakespeare, early modern literature, the history of scale, Reformation religious controversy, word and image, comparative media studies, and histories of gender and the body.