Rachel Clark bio

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

Scholars Program Director

Dr. Rachel Clark has taught British literature at Wartburg since 2011 and has directed 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 Early Modern England, examines witchcraft in the contexts of early modern disability and medicine to help us understand the phenomenon of witch persecution in new ways.

At Wartburg, Dr. Clark teaches Scholars courses, as well as a range of courses in the English major. In addition to her regular on-campus classes, she also takes students abroad to the British Isles during May term.

When she is not teaching, she enjoys playing the piano, making pottery, singing in the Metropolitan Chorale, and working on her watercolor skills.

Courses Taught

• SCH 101 Utopias and Dystopias
• SCH 202 Stardom and Scandal
• EN 112 Intermediate Composition
• EN 155 Introduction to Film
• EN 201 Survey of British Literature I
• EN 202 Survey of British Literature II
• EN 261 The British Isles: Literary Locations (study abroad May term)
• EN 295 Magic and Witchcraft in British Literature
• EN 316 Shakespeare
• EN 331 Structure of English

Selected Publications

• “‘Lame Doings’: Amputation, Impotence, and Community in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and A Larum for London.” Phantom Grief, Prosthetic Mourning: Amputation and the Semiotics of ‘Loss’, eds. Erik Grayson and Maren Scheurer. Forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.
• “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).