Katherine Blankenau

• Position: Assistant Professor
• Department: English
• Office Location: Building 52, Room 151
• kblankenau@uwf.edu
• Campus: 850.474.2923

Biography

Blankenau’s scholarly interests include early modern drama, travel narratives, and transatlantic women’s writing. Her research focuses on the ideals and ethics of hospitality in British literature during the early modern period. She has published on the roles of guests, hosts, and strangers in articles including “From Plays Within to Players Without: Theatrical hospitality in Hamlet and Sir Thomas More,” and “‘As well by the English as by the strangers’: Performing a multicultural London in The Magnificent Entertainment.”

In her research and especially in the classroom, she enjoys engaging with material texts, like the presumably Shakespearean manuscript pages of Sir Thomas More or the frontispiece of Phillis Wheatley Peters’s Poems on various subjects, to explore what they can teach us about authorship in the past and present.

Blankenau is currently working on her first book, Hospitable Transactions: Guests and Hosts in the Early Modern Literary Marketplace, which explores the intersection of ethics and commerce within England’s burgeoning entertainment industry from 1500-1660.

Blankenau received her bachelor’s degrees in English and journalism from the University of Kansas, her master’s degree in English from Southern Methodist University, and her Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University.