Rachel Clark bio

B.A., 2002, M.A., 2005, Ph.D., 2011, The Ohio State University

Honors Director; Faculty-in-Residence

Dr. Rachel Clark has taught British literature at Wartburg since 2011 and has directed the Honors Community (formerly known as the Scholars Program) since 2018. Her research focuses on early modern English literature—Shakespeare and his contemporaries—with special interests in disability studies and the history of the book. In 2018, she was selected as a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar and participated in the summer institute “Global Histories of Disability” at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. She presents regularly at the annual conferences of the Shakespeare Association of America and the Sixteenth Century Society. Her current book project, Witchcraft and Disability in the Early Modern Atlantic World, examines how witchcraft itself created discourses of ability, disability, and hyperability that intersect with the racialized, gendered, and (a)sexual bodies of witches—ultimately helping to form notions of ableism that persist today.

At Wartburg, Dr. Clark teaches Honors courses, as well as a range of courses in the English major. As faculty-in-residence, she also lives in an apartment in Clinton Hall, on the same floor as the Honors living/learning community. You will often see her around campus with her own animal familiar, a sweet poodle named Jellybean. Please say hello! Jellybean would love to become your best friend, and Dr. Clark would love to chat.

When she is not teaching or preventing Jellybean from eating mysterious objects, Dr. Clark enjoys playing the piano, making pottery, reading books for fun (!), and watching British detective shows.

Courses Taught

• SCH 101 Utopias and Dystopias (first-year honors seminar)
• SCH 115 Opportunities Seminar (professional development for honors students)
• SCH 202 Witches Around the World (second-year honors seminar)
• EN 115 College Composition: Queer Bodies, Queer Lives
• EN 153 Introduction to Disability Studies
• EN 155 Introduction to Film
• EN 201 Cornerstones of British Literature
• EN 202 Contemporary British Literature and Film
• EN 233 Magic and Witchcraft in British Literature
• EN 261 The British Isles: Literary Locations (May term travel course to the UK and/or Ireland)
• EN 316 Shakespeare
• EN 331 Structure of English

Selected Publications

• “White Witches, Black Witches, and Queens: Race, Ability, and Power in Early Modern England.” Race/Queer/Queens, eds. Urvashi Chakravarty and Mira Assaf Kafantaris. Under consideration with Palgrave.
• “Azeem and the Witch: Race, Disability, and Medievalisms in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.” “Representing the Medieval in Popular Culture: Remembering the Angevins,” ed. Esther L. Cuenca, a Special Collection from Open Library of Humanities Journal. Forthcoming.
• “The Sorceress (1987) and the Limits of the Law.” An Introduction to Medieval Law and Society through Cinema, ed. Esther L. Cuenca. Under consideration by Fordham University Press.
• “‘Lame Doings’: Amputation, Impotence, and Community in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and A Larum for London.” Amputation in Literature and Film: Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of ‘Loss’, eds. Erik Grayson and Maren Scheurer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
• “The Anti-Brexit Cymbeline.” Early Modern Culture 12, Article 26, 2017.
• “John Webster and the Height of Jacobean Tragedy.” Seventeenth Century English Literature, ed. Kirilka Stavreva. Gale Researcher (peer-reviewed online reference source), 2017.
• “The Merry Wives of Windsor Q1 (1602).” Shakespeare Documented. Folger Shakespeare Library online exhibition, 2017.
• “The Merry Wives of Windsor Q2 (1619).” Shakespeare Documented. Folger Shakespeare Library online exhibition, 2017.
• “Rebellion in Arcadia: Caroline Anti-Militarism in Dramatic Adaptations of Sidney.” James Shirley and Early Modern Theatre: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Barbara Ravelhofer. New York: Routledge, 2017.
• “Doubling the Dream.” Upstart: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, January 2016. http://www.clemson.edu/upstart/Reviews/clark_dream/clark_dream.xhtml
• “Moll Cutpurse, Victorian Drag King: Jo Davies’s The Roaring Girl.” Early Modern Studies Journal 6 (2014).