I am a scholar of 16th- and 17th-century English literature and theater history, focusing on gender, disability, and performance. I work as an Associate Professor of English at Ohio State. My research interests include Shakespeare and his contemporaries as well as lesser-known women writers like the poet Hester Pulter and the dramatist Elizabeth Cary. I explore both how early modern literature was understood in its time and how it resonates today. 

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I am writing two books on Shakespeare right now. One examines court masques in his plays, and another explains how gender and sexuality were performed on his all-male stage. My earlier book, The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, and Gender (Cambridge, 2016; paperback 2019), tells the story of a short-lived theatrical form that was crucial to Elizabethan politics. Through performance, women devisers acted as political lobbyists. In print, publishers adapted these entertainments in ways that frequently erased women's labor. I continue to recover women's contributions to literature and theater; my recent work includes a prize-winning article on women patrons of Renaissance drama in the journal Early Theatre.

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I enjoy sharing this work in classrooms, at conferences, and at public talks that connect Shakespeare and his world to questions we ask today. I like making things with my students, such as a documentary I directed about the history and performances of Cary's Tragedy of Mariam. I also edit book reviews for Shakespeare Bulletin and am a contributing editor and member of the advisory board for The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making. ​

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To learn more, you can click the links in the header or read my full CV. If you'd like to be in touch, contact me at kolkovich.1 @osu.edu.