B.A., English and German, The Ohio State University, 2002
M.A., English, The Ohio State University, 2005
Ph.D., English, The Ohio State University, 2011
Dr. Rachel Ellen Clark has taught British literature at Wartburg since 2011. Dr. Clark’s 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 participated in the NEH summer institute “Global Histories of Disability” at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. 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 discourses of witchcraft made the intimate policing of people’s bodies and abilities a community and state concern, thereby not only igniting changes in cultural conceptions of ability but simultaneously defining early modern understandings of race, gender, and sexuality.
At Wartburg, Dr. Clark has served as faculty-in-residence (2020-2024) and honors director (2018-2025). You will often see her around campus with her own animal familiar, a standard 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
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
HON 100 First-Year Honors Seminar: Utopias and Dystopias
HON 200 Second-Year Honors Seminar: Witches Around the World
HON 200 Second-Year Honors Seminar: The Gothic: Cultural Hauntings
SEM 100 First-Year Seminar: Fantasy U.
Selected Publications
With Lucy C. Barnhouse. “Le moine et la sorcière (Sorceress, 1987): Church Law and the Witch Trial That Wasn’t.” Law, Justice, and Society in the Medieval World: An Introduction through Film, ed. Esther Liberman Cuenca, M. Christina Bruno, and Anthony Perron. New York: Fordham University Press, 2025.
“On the Worship of Guinefort the Dog,” from Étienne de Bourbon, On the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit (ca. 1250). Translation from the Latin. Law, Justice, and Society in the Medieval World: An Introduction through Film, ed. Esther Liberman Cuenca, M. Christina Bruno, and Anthony Perron. New York: Fordham University Press, 2025.
“Azeem and the Witch: Race, Disability, and Medievalisms in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.” Open Library of Humanities 1 (June 2023). DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.9796
‘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.
