Degrees

Ph.D. Harvard 1994
A.B. Harvard 1988

Research Area

Gender and sexuality in early modern England

Professional Societies

Modern Language Association
Renaissance Society of America
Shakespeare Association of America
Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies

Professional Honors

Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 2004-2005
Short-Term Fellowship, The Folger Shakespeare Library, 2004
Short-Term Fellowship, The Huntington Library, 2005
Fellowship, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Vanderbilt University, 2002-2003
Research Scholars Grant, Vanderbilt University, 2002-2003
Roland H. Bainton Book Prize for Literature, awarded for Tough Love, Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, 2001
Short-Term Fellowship, The Newberry Library, 2001
Short-Term Fellowship, The Folger Shakespeare Library, 2000
Grant, University Research Council, Vanderbilt University, 1998-99; 1999-2000
Fellowship, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Vanderbilt University, 1998-99

Publications

Book
Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Duke UP, 2000)
Selected Articles
"Will in Overplus: Recasting Misogyny is Shakespeare's Sonnets," ELH (forthcoming)
"A Tragedy of Good Intentions: Maternal Agency in 3 Henry VI and King John," Renaissance Drama (2003)
"Chastity, Militant and Married: Cavendish’s Romance, Milton’s Masque," PMLA (March 2003)
"The Wrong Question: Thinking Through Virginity," differences (Summer 2002)
"Breaking the Mirror Stage," in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Doug Trevor (New York: Routledge, 2000)
"Mother Love," in Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, ed. Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000)
"Fearful Simile: Stealing the Breech in Shakespeare's Chronicle Plays," Shakespeare Quarterly (Summer 1998)
"Missing the Breast: Disease, Desire, and the Singular Effect of Amazons," in The Body in Parts, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997)
"Amazon Reflections in the Jacobean Queen's Masque," Studies in English Literature (Spring 1995)

Biography

Kathryn Schwarz received her Ph.D. in English language and literature from Harvard University in 1994. Since coming to Vanderbilt in 1996, she has taught graduate and undergraduate classes on Renaissance drama, Shakespearean sexualities, Renaissance prose fictions, revenge tragedy, and chivalric romance.

Her book, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance, was published by Duke University Press in 2000, and was awarded the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize for Literature by the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in 2001. Focusing on the works of Ralegh, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Jonson, Tough Love examines representations of Amazons in the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean exploration narratives, political polemics, medical texts, conduct manuals and exemplary catalogues. The book argues that, rather than describing spaces of exotic fantasy, Amazonian narratives instead provide ways of talking about sexuality, domesticity and gender roles in the early modern period.

Her articles have appeared in journals including Renaissance Drama, Shakespeare Quarterly, PMLA, differences, and Studies in English Literature. Currently, she is working on a book which investigates the relationships among femininity, intention, virtue and misogyny in the early modern period, focusing particularly on the ways in which the conventions that govern feminine behavior are complicated by their willful enactment. This book, Shakespeare, Will, and Women, suggests that by knowingly inhabiting conditions such as beauty, virginity, constancy, and maternity, virtuous feminine subjects illuminate and trouble the ideologies of gender.