About
I am a literary scholar and theater historian, specializing in the plays, pageants, and poetry of 16th and 17th century England. I work as an Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University.
My first 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. For the past decade, I have been researching the bookish Stanley women and gathering evidence of female patrons of Shakespeare's theater. I spread the word about Hester Pulter, a fantastic 17th-century poet, as a contributing editor and member of the advisory board for The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making. I'm editing The Tragedy of Mariam by Elizabeth Cary for the open-access Digital Renaissance Editions. In Spring 2024, I directed scenes from the play and a documentary about its history.
My other scholarly passion is Shakespeare, the subject of my two in-progress books. The first is an academic monograph called "Shakespeare's Revels: Masques and Identity on the Public Stage" that examines how Shakespeare used the courtly spectacles called masques and how editors and directors have used them since. By approaching Shakespeare's masques as dynamic conversations about identity across time, I analyze shifting (and sometimes persistent) views of gender, sexuality, race, and disability in the past four centuries of Shakespearean reception. A second book, titled "Performing Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare" and designed for the "Arden Shakespeare Insights" series, introduces students and general readers to Shakespeare's all-male stage. How did it work? What do we know about how actors performed gender and sexuality? I also edit book reviews for Shakespeare Bulletin.
If you're interested, you can read my full CV. If you'd like to be in touch, contact me at kolkovich.1 (at) osu.edu.