Virginia M. Vaughan

Professor of English

Department of English
Clark University
Worcester, MA 01610-1477

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

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

Professor Vaughan is on sabbatical Fall 2009

Brief Biography

Professor Vaughan specializes in Renaissance literature, especially in Shakespeare. She has published 3 books on Othello and her most recent monograph, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800, analyzes the role blackface performance played in early modern English drama. With her husband, American historian Alden T. Vaughan, she has co-written Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History and co-edited Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ as well as the Arden edition (third series) of The Tempest. She teaches courses in Shakespeare at the introductory and advanced level, a team-taught workshop in theater and literature, Shakespeare from Page to Stage, and a seminar, Studies in the Renaissance.

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.

For more information about my work, please visit my Active Learning and Research pages.