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. Her current research brings together theater history and theories of mind as part of a broader exploration of subjects and objects in early modern literature.

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, 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 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.