English

Heather Hirschfeld

Heather Hirschfeld

Heather Hirschfeld Professor, Director of Undergraduate Studies

Kenneth Curry Professor of English

411 McClung Tower
Phone: (865) 974-6961
Fax: (865) 974-6926
E-mail: hhirschf@utk.edu
Link to video: https://youtu.be/SnHwMZSNQJ4

Biography

Heather Hirschfeld specializes in early modern English literature, focusing on Shakespeare, Renaissance drama and religious controversy, and the history of authorship, collaboration, and textual communities. Her work on “the end of satisfaction” was awarded an NEH Fellowship for 2009-2010, and she received College awards for her scholarship in 2004 and 2018.


At the undergraduate level, she loves teaching introductory and advanced courses in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama (ENGL 206, 404, 405, and 406). Her recent graduate teaching includes seminars on Revenge Tragedy, Accounting for Renaissance Drama, and Shakespeare’s Playbooks. She received College and Chancellor’s awards for her teaching in 2007 and 2016, respectively.


Professor Hirschfeld served as the Riggsby Director of UT’s Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies from 2011-2015 and as Director of Undergraduate Studies from 2019022. She now holds the Kenneth Curry Professorship in the English Department. She is co-editor, with Laurie Maguire (Oxford University) and Rory Loughnane (University of Kent) of the Routledge Series on Early Modern Authorship. Her abiding theoretical interest is in psychoanalytic theory, and she has served on the Board of Appalachian Psychoanalytic Society.

Education

  • B.A., Princeton University, 1990
  • Ph.D., Duke University, 1998

Publications

Representative articles

  • “Bethinking on the Early Modern Stage,” Logomotives: Words that Change the Premodern World, ed. Marjorie Rubright and Stephen Spiess (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2023).
  •  “Collaboration,” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Authorship, ed. Will Sharpe and Rory Loughnane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023).
  • ” ‘To double business bound’: Shakespeare, Hamlet, and Multiple Gen Ed Requirements,” in Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, ed. Marvin Sasser and Kelly Neil (Palgrave, forthcoming, 2023).
  • “ ‘The games afoote’: Playing, Preying and Projecting in Caroline Drama,” in Theatre and Games, eds. Tom Bishop, Gina Bloom and Erika Lin (ARC Humanities Press, 2021), 115-136.
  • “Christopher Marlowe,” Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019).
  • “Introduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Heather Hirschfeld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 1-20.
  • “Playing with Hell: The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Infernal,” in State of Play: The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. Gretchen Minton (London: Arden Bloomsbury, 2017), 61-84.
  • “‘Wildfire at Midnight’: The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Gunpowder Plot,” Review of English Studies 68. 283 (2016): 60-80; online at https://academic.oup.com/res/article/68/283/60/2567008
  • “The Revenger’s Tragedy: The Critical Backstory,” in The Revenger’s Tragedy: A Critical Reader, ed. Brian Walsh (London: Arden, 2016), 23-42.
  • “Authors, Collaboration, and Attribution,” in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Mary Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
  • “Richard Brome and the Idea of a Caroline Theatre,” in Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. Ton Hoenselaars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 226-43.
  • “Historicizing Satisfaction in Shakespeare’s Othello,” in Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton, ed. Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 113-29.

Awards and Grants

  • UT College of Arts and Sciences Senior Research/Creative Achievement Award, Fall 2018
  • UT Chancellor’s Teaching Award, 2016
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2009-2010 
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 2007