Wendy Beth Hyman

  • Donald R. Longman Professor of English and Comparative Literature
  • Chair of English

Areas of Study

Education

  • BA, Smith College, 1997
  • MA, Harvard University, 2000
  • PhD, Harvard University, 2005

Biography

I am the Donald R. Longman Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of English, and former Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. My research and teaching interests focus on Shakespeare and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, especially in relation to intellectual history, the history of science and technology, Renaissance art and visual culture, and classical mythology. Above all, I am compelled by how literature represents—and even creates—new forms of knowledge. I believe that literary creation is a mode of world-making that invites our participation.

I am the author of Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance  (Oxford UP, 2019), which demonstrates that carpe diem seduction poetry, far from being merely a trivial commonplace, was a crucial instrument in early modern intellectual life. The book was selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title in 2021.

My most recent book, Macbeth: A Visual Companion (ACMRS, 2026) was the result of a collaboration with OC 22’ alum and illustrator Clair Wang. What if we could learn to read as Renaissance readers did: with greater capacity to “see” literary language like chiasmus and equivocation, the embedded allegory and the antiquated pun? This book offers an illustrated guide to those literary features of Shakespeare’s texts that can’t be represented on stage. It looks like a graphic novel, but it functions as a supercharged guide to close reading.

I have edited several essay collections. The coedited Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (Edinburgh, 2019) makes the case for the liberatory value of teaching historical literature. The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Ashgate, 2011) places literary automata and other animated objects within their larger aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and scientific contexts. I also coedited a special issue (52.3) of English Literary Renaissance on the theme “Theorizing Early Modern Fictions.”

I am passionate about teaching. At Oberlin I offer a wide variety of courses on early modern literature and culture, including Shakespearean Tragedy, Shakespeare and Social Justice, The Limits of Genre, Literature and the Scientific Revolution, Thinking with Renaissance Literature, Wonder and Invention in the Renaissance, Visuality and Materiality, and The Poetry of Love and Seduction. I also regularly teach What is Literature, and occasionally a senior seminar, Words and Things. Many of my courses support not just English majors but also students in Art History, Book Studies, Cinema and Media, Classics, Comparative Literature, Creative Writing, GSFS, Philosophy, and Theater. Almost all my classes include humanities “labs” in the Allen Art Museum, Letterpress Studio, and Special Collections. 

In addition to my regular Oberlin teaching, I frequently teach internationally in Italy (Rome, Florence, and Venice/Padua) through a course I created, Shakespeare in Italy. I also teach for the ASE (Advanced Studies in England) in Bath, England, and I serve on their advisory committee. I have also taught at the 92nd St Y’s Roundtable program. And finally, I teach Shakespeare as a volunteer at the Northeast Reintegration Center, through ARC Behind Bars, the Artists’ Rehabilitation Coalition.

Fall 2026

What is Literature: Introduction to the Advanced Study of Literature — ENGL 299

Thinking With Renaissance Literature — ENGL 315

Spring 2027

Shakespearean Tragedy — ENGL 206

Visuality, Materiality, and Renaissance Literature — CMPL 308

Visuality, Materiality, and Renaissance Literature — ENGL 308

Recent and forthcoming classes include:

  • ENG 303: Renaissance Wonder and Invention
  • ENG 123: Introduction to Shakespeare
  • ENG 290: Shakespearean Comedy and Social Justice
  • ENG 215: Thinking with Renaissance Literature
  • ENG 400: Senior Tutorial
  • ENG 309: The Poetry of Love and Seduction in the Renaissance
  • ENG 218: Shakespeare and the Limits of Genre
  • ENG/CMPL 304: Shakespeare and Metamorphosis
  • ENG 206: Shakespearean Tragedy   
  • ENG/CMPL 308: Visuality and Materiality in Renaissance Literature
  • ENG/CMPL 306: Literature and the Scientific Revolution

Books:

  • Macbeth: A Visual Companion (ACMRS, 2026)
  • Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry (Oxford, 2019)
  • Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (Edinburgh, 2019).
  • The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Ashgate, 2011)

Articles and Book Chapters

  • “Theater as Portal: A Shakespearean Thought Experiment,” Experiential and Experimental Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, ed. James Kearney and Pavneet Aulakh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2026).
  • “Minute/Minute: On Forms of Time in Renaissance Lyric,” Lyric Temporalities, Kimberly Johnson and Ryan Netzley, eds. (University of Toronto Press, 2026).
  • “Afterword,” Situating Shakespeare Pedagogy in Higher Education: Social Justice and Institutional Contexts, ed. Marissa Greenberg and Elizabeth Williamson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Jan 2024).
  • “Teaching Titus Andronicus and Ovidian Myth When Sexual Violence is on the Public Stage,” Global Shakespeare and Social Injustice: Towards a Transformative Encounter, ed. Chris Thurman and Sandra Young (Arden-Bloomsbury Global Shakespeare Inverted, 2023): 230-254.
  • “Interstitial Fiction,” with Jennifer Waldron in Theorizing Early Modern Fictions, ELR 52.3 (Aug 2022): 317-329.
  • “Beyond Beyond: Cymbeline, The Camera Obscura, and the Ontology of Elsewhere,” ELR 52.3 (Aug 2022): 397-412.
  • “Patterns, The Shakespearean Sonnet, and Conduits of Scale,” Spenser Studies 36 (June 2022): 323-336.
  • “The Inner Lives of Renaissance Machines,” Renaissance Personhood: Materiality, Taxonomy, Process, ed. Kevin Curran (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 44-61.
  • “Seeing the Invisible Under the Microscope: Natural Philosophy and John Donne’s Flea,” Philological Quarterly 98.1-2 (Winter-Spring 2019): 157-180. Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms, ed. Jenny C. Mann and Debapriya Sarkar.
  • “‘Deductions from metaphors’: Figurative Truth, Poetical Language, and Early Modern Science,” The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature, Science, and Culture, ed. Evelyn Tribble and Howard Marchitello (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 27-48. Reviews: Renaissance Quarterly 72.2; Isis 110.2; British Society for Literature and Science 2018; Journal of the Northern Renaissance 2017
  • “Physics, Metaphysics, and Religion in Lyric Poetry,” Blackwell Companion to British Literature, vol. 2 (1450-1660), ed. Robert DeMaria, et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2014), 197-212.
  • “Embodying Rome” William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, based on the New Folger Shakespeare Editions. Eds. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, dir. Katherine Rowe. Luminary Digital Media, 2014. iPad Application. 5800 words.
  • “‘For now hath time made me his numbering clock’: Shakespeare’s Jacquemarts,” Early Theatre 16.2 (December 2013): 145-58.
  • “Building a Book Studies Program at a Liberal Arts College” (w/Laura Baudot) in Past or Portal: Teaching Undergraduates Using Special Collections and Archives, Peggy Seiden, Eleanor Mitchell, and Suzy Taraba, eds. (ACRL, 2012), 206-211.
  • “‘Mathematical experiments of long silver pipes’: The Renaissance Trope of the Mechanical Bird,” The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature, ed. Wendy Beth Hyman (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 145-162.
  • “Seizing Flowers in Spenser’s Garden and Bower,” English Literary Renaissance 37.2 (May 2007): 193-214.
  • “The Unfortunate Traveller and Authorial Self-Consciousness,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 45.1 (Winter 2005): 23-41.

Currently under review is an essay collection, Rethinking Invention in the Renaissance. The volume’s dozen essays seek to uncover the fascinating hidden lives of ingenious making: all the ways in which it is the product not just of intentionality and genius but also of collaboration and confusion, recursion and error. 

I am working on two articles: “A Looking-glass called a Theatrical Glass”: On Seeing Ghosts in Dee, della Porta, and Macbeth” and “Britomart’s Myrrha: Mimesis and the Specter of Incest in Renaissance Literature.”

My current book project, Shakespeare and the Ingenious Machine, approaches the ontologically bizarre worlds of Shakespeare’s last plays (moving statues, resurrected mummies, mythological deities, airy spirits, visual mirages) in conversation with early modern technologies of wonder and optical reorientation. Theater, I argue, is an epistemological machine that facilitates encounters with “elsewhere,” and in the process demands an expansive metaphysical and ethical purview.

I am the “Sciences, Philosophies, and Learning” editor for the Routledge online resource, “The Renaissance World.” And with Mary Crane, I am in the early stages of work for an Oxford Handbook of Literature and Science.

Other publications include the Program Note for the 2026 summer Globe (UK) Theater performance of Merry Wives of Windsor, annotations of Julius Caesar for Luminary Digital Media, and book reviews. I am also working on a poetry chapbook and am a novice oil painter.

Notes

Wendy Beth Hyman Book Chapters Published

Donald R. Longman Professor of English and Comparative Literature Wendy Beth Hyman published two book chapters this spring: one on Renaissance lyric and the other on Renaissance drama. "Minute/Minute: On Time and Scale in Renaissance Lyric" appears in the Lyric Temporalities (Toronto University Press), and "Theatre as Portal: A Shakespearean Thought Experiment," is out in the volume Experiential and Experimental Knowledge on the Early Modern English Stage (Edinburgh University Press).

Wendy Beth Hyman Elected as a Trustee of Shakespeare Association of America, Delivered Talks This Spring

Professor Wendy Beth Hyman has been elected to serve as a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. She has also given three invited talks this spring: “Why the Renaissance Matters Now: Teaching the Early Modern with Integrity” (Stanford University), “Shakespeare and the Ingenious Machine” (Huntington Library), and “Intellectual Wellness: The Commonplace Book Tradition” (Cleveland Humanities Festival/Cuyahoga Community College).

Wendy Beth Hyman's Monograph Identified as an “Outstanding Academic Title”

Professor of English and Comparative Literature Wendy Beth Hyman's monograph, Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry (Oxford UP, 2019), was identified as an “Outstanding Academic Title” by CHOICE 2021. Her co-edited collection, Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (Edinburgh UP, 2019) has gone into paperback. She recently published an article, “Beyond Beyond: Cymbeline and the Ontology of Elsewhere,” in English Literary Renaissance 52.3. Along with Jen Waldron, she was guest editor of a special issue of that journal, Theorizing Early Modern Fictions. Finally, an article called “Patterns, The Shakespearean Sonnet, and Conduits of Scale” appeared in Spenser Studies 36 (June 2022). 

Wendy Beth Hyman Participates in Roundtable at the Shakespeare Association of America

Professor Wendy Beth Hyman participated in a remote roundtable, “Shakespeare and Social Justice: From Principle to Action,” at the Shakespeare Association of America and also gave an invited talk on literary imagination and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She will present the lecture, “Ovid, Shakespeare, and Rape: Empowering Survivors in the Early Modern Classroom,” at the online Women and Power Festival at Shakespeare’s Globe in December.

Wendy Beth Hyman gives invited lectures

Professor of English and Comparative Literature Wendy Beth Hyman has given two recent invited lectures. The first, “How Sonnets Think,” took place remotely at Oxford Brookes University in the UK; and “John Donne’s Flea and the Scientific Revolution” was delivered to the John Donne Society. She was also recently interviewed by Jeffrey R. Wilson (Harvard University) for a forthcoming project called “An Oral History of Public Shakespeare.”

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