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Staff Profile

Professor Kate Chedgzoy

Professor of Renaissance Literature

Background

Co-chair, HaSS Faculty Athena Swan Self-Assessment Team

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

I contribute to a wide range of undergraduate modules. In 2018-19 I am module leader for SEL3100 Other Renaissances: Gender, Race and Sexuality in Early Modern Culture, and contribute lectures to SEL1023 Transformations and SEL2202 Writing New Worlds.

Postgraduate Teaching

None in 2018-19

Research


Research Interests

I am an intersectional feminist scholar of early modern literature and culture. My core interests are in the politics of gender and sexuality in relation to textual production, paying particular attention to the ways in which cultural authority is articulated, exercised and contested through process of reading, writing and performance.

Having established my reputation as a Shakespeare scholar (Shakespeare’s Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture, 1996), I have increasingly focused on women’s cultural production across a range of modes and genres, with a strong emphasis on bringing intersectional feminist methods and approaches into dialogue with historicised, and frequently archive-based scholarship (Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550-1700, 2007).

These methods and approaches have also been extended to the study of representations of childhood and textual production by children, attending initially to children's literature and more recently to writings by children and the history of childhood.

Other Expertise

I have particular interests in performances of gender and childhood; the relations between literature and memory; and life-writing.

Current Work

I am currently working on two projects:

Open Clasp, Open Archive: Newcastle-based feminist theatre company Open Clasp (http://www.openclasp.org.uk/) is gifting the archive recording its 25-year history to Newcastle University. With my colleague Jo Robinson, Catrina McHugh MBE and Ellie Turner, co-directors of Open Clasp, and Northern Bridge CDA-funded doctoral researcher Lucy Doig, I am working to explore the archive's potential as a catalyst for research, teaching and engagement. 

Writing Children's Lives: This monograph will argue that childhood had a meaningful presence in early modern culture, and that children shaped that presence; through their very existence, and as producers of culture in ways that spoke richly and expressively about their lives. And that consequently if we are really to understand the history of childhood, the history of adults’ relationships with children and childhood, and the history of life-writing, we need to give due weight to children’s contribution and presence. By doing so we’ll learn a lot about children; we’ll also learn a lot about adults, and about early modern literary culture..

Postgraduate Supervision

I am currently co-supervising eight doctoral researchers, most working on projects that take a feminist and/or queer approach to early modern literature and culture, with two focusing on contemporary feminist theatre. I welcome inquiries from potential students whose interests dovetail with any aspect of mine, as outlined above or evidenced by my publications list, or from post-doctoral researchers wishing to apply for research fellowship funding at Newcastle University.

 

 

Publications