Faculty Scholarship

DR. CRISTINE M. VARHOLY, ASSISSTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH

THE FOCUS of the scholarly research of Assistant Professor of English Cristine M. Varholy is on the literature and culture of early modern England, with a specific concentration on women and crime. She is particularly interested in the language and narratives used to describe female misbehavior in the age of Shakespeare.

Her essay “On Their Backs: Women’s Clothing, Roleplay, and Eroticism in Early Modern England” will appear in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies in the spring of 2008. In the essay Varholy studies the commonalities between stories about women’s use of clothing documented in court records relating to prostitution and the similar use of clothing as both a plot device and a prop to enhance the erotic performances of the boy actors on the early modern London stage.

Varholy has also presented several seminar papers at the annual meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), including, in 2006, “‘Twixt simple truth and a dissembling brow’: Performing Women in A Mad World, My Masters,” an analysis of a series of theatrical performances used by female characters to outwit their male counterparts in a play by Thomas Middleton; and, in 2007, “The Failure of Female Attachments in Othello,” a consideration of how Desdemona’s isolation reflects a prevailing tension between individual and group identity in Shakespeare’s play.

Varholy has also presented a paper about contemporary interpretations of the early modern theatrical practice of crossdressing, “What’s So Funny about Crossdressing?” at the Fourth Blackfriars Conference at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, in the fall of 2007.

At the 2005 SAA annual meeting, she, along with Richelle Munkhoff, then on the faculty of Tulane University, conducted a seminar entitled “Fragments/Margins/Archives,” in which participants explored the methodological challenges faced by literary critics who study historically marginalized figures and attempt to reconstruct their histories from fragmentary evidence.

Reflecting her interest in pedagogical issues, in the fall of 2006 Varholy joined Associate Professor of English Evan R. Davis and two faculty members from Randolph College (formerly Randolph-Macon Woman’s College) to lead a workshop on gender dynamics in the classroom at “Attending to Early Modern Women—And Men,” a symposium sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland. The four workshop leaders used their experiences in single-sex classrooms as a springboard for discussion about how to approach topics that tend to produce resistance and confusion among students who are studying early modern culture, especially topics related to gender. A summary of the workshop will appear in the proceedings volume from the symposium.

Varholy, who joined the faculty in 2005, received her B.A. from Wake Forest University and both the M.A. and Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

BEYOND THE Classroom FOR THE Classroom
Hampden-Sydney College Faculty Scholarship 2005-2008
A report by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty