Katherine Romack

Associate Professor

Katherine Romack received her PhD from Syracuse University where she specialized in seventeenth-century literature by women. Romack is the co-editor, with James Fitzmaurice, of Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections and was the 2003-2005 recipient of a Stanford Humanities Fellows Program Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in Drama. Her work on seventeenth-century women and culture includes essays on the drama and criticism of the prolific Margaret Cavendish, the deployment of tropes of monstrous maternity in women’s political writings, and the poetics of early Quaker female pamphleteers. Her current book project, entitled Gender, Politics and Play on the Interregnum Stage, explores the dynamic performance traditions that flourished in England after the outbreak of civil war. Although the theatres themselves were closed, the Interregnum witnessed a proliferation of dramatic activity that illuminates the rapid transformation of gendered ontology that occurred between the decline of the boy actor and the rise of the actress. Other research interests include Milton and religious enthusiasm, Baroque performance, and women’s troubled relationship to the metaphysical tradition. At UWF, Romack teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Shakespeare, Milton, women's writing, as well as gender and performance theory.

Links to Books:

Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 2006) Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice eds.