Heather Hirschfeld
Heather Hirschfeld
Distinguished Professor of the Humanities
Shakespeare, early modern drama, theater history, early modern religion and literature, early modern print culture, psychoanalytic theory.
Heather Hirschfeld specializes in early modern English literature, and she has published widely on Shakespeare, Renaissance drama and religious controversy, and the history of authorship, collaboration, and textual communities. She was awarded an NEH Fellowship for 2009-2010 for her second book, The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in Shakespeare’s Age (Cornell, 2014), and she has since edited The New Cambridge Shakespeare Hamlet and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy. She received College awards for her scholarship in 2004 and 2018. In addition to editing Edward III for the Cambridge Shakespeare Editions, her current research brings together theater history, linguistics, and theories of mind and affect as part of a broader exploration of “the impersonal Renaissance.”
At the undergraduate level, she loves teaching introductory and advanced courses in Shakespeare and early modern drama (ENGL 206, 404, 405, and 406). Her recent graduate teaching includes seminars on Revenge Tragedy, Shakespeare’s Playbooks, and Renaissance Impersonations. She received College and Chancellor’s awards for her teaching in 2007, 2016, and 2025.
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 for the English Department from 2019-2022. She is co-editor, with Laurie Maguire (Oxford University) and Rory Loughnane (University of Kent), of the Routledge Series on Early Modern Authorship, and co-editor, with Edward Gieskes, of the annual journal Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. Her abiding theoretical interest is in psychoanalytic theory, and she has served on the Board of Appalachian Psychoanalytic Society.
Education
- Ph.D., Duke University, 1998
- B.A., Princeton University, 1990
Specialties
Honors
- UT College of Arts and Sciences James R. and Nell W. Cunningham Outstanding Teaching Award
- 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
Publications
Representative Publications
- “Shakespeare and Repentance,” Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion, ed. Will Stockton (Routledge), forthcoming Spring 2026.
- “Coriolanus, Fort-Da and the Subject-as-object of War,” Early Modern Drama and the Theatre of War: Militarism, Conflict and Disruption in the Plays of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. Bronwen Price and Hilary Hinds (Manchester), forthcoming, Fall 2025.
- “Collaboration,” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Authorship, ed. Will Sharpe and Rory Loughnane (Oxford), forthcoming Winter 2025.
- “Wilfred R. Bion and the Psychoanalytic Study of Thinking in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare and Psychoanalysis, ed. James Stone and Catherine Bates (Palgrave), forthcoming Fall 2025.
- “Bethink,” Logomotives: Words that Change the Premodern World, ed. Marjorie Rubright and Stephen Spiess (Edinburgh, 2025), 31-44.
- “ ‘To double business bound’: Shakespeare, Hamlet, and Multiple Gen Ed Requirements,” in Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, ed. Marvin Sasser and Kelly Neil (Palgrave, 2024), 57-69.
- “The Space of Hell, the Place of Print in Early Modern London,” Renaissance Papers 2022 (Camden House, 2023), 1-15.
- “ ‘Report me to the unsatisfied’: Hamlet, Hamlet and Theatrical Exchange,” Hamlet: Lectures Critiques, Cycnos 38 (2023): 125-142.
- “ ‘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).
- The New Cambridge Shakespeare Hamlet, Cambridge University Press, 2019.