Virginia Mason Vaughan

Professor of English
Department of English
Clark University
Worcester, MA 01610-1477

phone: 508-793-7144
email: vvaughan@clarku.edu

 

Education

B.A. University of Michigan, 1968
M.A. University of Michigan, 1970
Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1972

Brief Biography

Professor Vaughan specializes in Early Modern English literature, with an emphasis on Shakespeare. She has published three books on Othello and co-edited The Tempest for the Third Arden Series. Her 2005 monograph, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1470-1800, examines the representation of black Africans on the early modern stage. She has recently completed two monographs; 'The Tempest': Shakespeare in Performance for Manchester University Press, and Shakespeare in America (with Alden T. Vaughan) for Oxford University Press. She teaches courses in Shakespeare at the introductory and advanced level as well as other courses in English Renaissance Literature.

Current Research and Teaching

I’ve been teaching and writing about Shakespeare for over thirty years. Although much of my early work was on Shakespeare’s history plays, in the last fifteen years my research has focused on the formation of racial attitudes during Shakespeare’s lifetime. I want to understand how English people came to think of themselves as “white” as opposed to the peoples of darker pigmentation they were encountering in Africa and the New World. My work on Shakespeare’s Tempest and Othello was aimed at understanding this complex cultural phenomenon, and my most recent book, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1700-1800, takes a direct look at the ways blackface performances on the early modern English stage both shaped and reflected the popular construction of black Africans.

I use a variety of tools in my research, including close reading of the texts that have come down to us, examination of the historical context in which those texts were written, feminist perspectives about the early modern construction of gender, and analysis of the ways plays were staged (performance-oriented criticism). These tools work equally well in the classroom. Introductory courses emphasize understanding Shakespeare’s language; more advanced courses explore the historical, social, and political world Shakespeare inhabited. In all classes students are asked to imagine a variety of performance possibilities, and, in some courses, to perform scenes themselves. The excitement of the classroom is the same as that of the research library –- in both venues I gain new insights into Shakespeare’s plays and what they have to tell us, not just about the past, but about the world we live in now.

Selected Publications

	2012: Shakespeare in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.		2011: 'The Tempest': Shakespeare in Performance. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
	2011: The Tempest. The Third Arden Series. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.		2007: Shakespeare in American Life. Oakland: Folger Shakespeare Library.
	2005: Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.		1998: Critical Essays on Shakespeare's The Tempest: Macmillan Library Reference.
	1994: Othello: A Contextual History. Cambridge University Press.