Biography

Elisa Oh holds a BA from Smith College; an MA from the University of Virginia; and a PhD from Boston University.  She has been teaching Shakespeare, British literature surveys, and literary theory in the Howard University English Department since 2008.  Her research interests are sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and culture that broaden our knowledge of race-making and gender, then and now.  Looking at Shakespeare, Wroth, Cary, and other Jacobean dramatists, she studies women's silences and fictional witch dances, court masques' representation of colonial power politics, and travel narratives' accounts of early encounters with African and Indigenous American communities.  Her research has been published in English Literary Renaissance; Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal; Explorations in Renaissance Culture; Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World, edited by Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea; The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race (2023), edited by Patricia Akhimie; and Situating Shakespeare Pedagogy in Higher Education: Social Justice and Institutional Contexts (2023), edited by Marissa Greenberg and Elizabeth Williamson. Her research has been supported by a Folger Shakespeare Institute Non-Residential Research Fellowship; an Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Short-Term Residency; and a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Award.  Her current book project is entitled Choreographies of Race and Gender: Dance, Ritual, and Travel in Early Modern English Literature.