Biography

Elisa Oh holds a B.A. from Smith College; an M.A. from the University of Virginia; and a Ph.D. 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 in drama and prose romance, 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; and Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World, edited by Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea.  Her forthcoming essays will appear in 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. In 2022-2023 her research is 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, Travel, and Ritual in Early Modern English Literature, 1558-1660.