About Me
I am the Hudson Strode Professor of English and Director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. Currently, I am also the Marilyn Williams Elmore and John Durr Elmore Professor of English (2023-2026). I received my B.A. summa cum laude from the University of Rochester in 1997 and my Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2003. I specialize in early modern literature, with concentrations in Tudor and Stuart drama, Shakespeare, and early modern women’s writing. My additional teaching and research interests include early modern theater culture, dramatic genres and genre theory, feminist theory and gender studies, economic criticism, and early modern religious culture.
My first monograph, Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2009), won the Sara A. Whaley Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association. My second monograph, The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge, 2015) offers a new understanding of how the theater, England’s most vibrant cultural institution in the Renaissance, shaped attitudes about primogeniture, one of the country’s most longstanding economic systems. Current projects include a co-authored monograph with Lara Dodds, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Future of Literary History, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2025. This book provides a synthesis and reassessment of the state of the field for early modern women’s writing and argues that a full accounting of early modern women’s literary and creative activities is necessary to the future of literary studies as a broader field. I am also under contract with Oxford University Press for a book on Shakespeare and Work for the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series.
I have held fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (at the Newberry Library). From 2012-2014 I served as an elected member of the Executive Committee for the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW), and from 2016-2021 I served on the Executive Committee for the Modern Language Association (MLA) Forum on Shakespeare. I also served as an elected trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America (2021-2024). Currently, I am Vice President of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender, and I will begin my two-year term as President in January of 2025.
I am also the editor of a book series, Strode Studies in Early Modern Literature and Culture, published by the University of Alabama Press.
Before coming to Alabama, I taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and at Fordham University.
Contact Information
Office Location: 237 English Building
Address:
Department of English
University of Alabama
Box 870244
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487
Email: mmdowd1@ua.edu
Phone: (205) 348-6538