Wendy Beth Hyman

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).

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). 

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.

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.”

Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature Wendy Beth Hyman has published a co-edited collection, Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, with Edinburgh University Press. Tania Boster, executive director of integrative and experiential learning, and director of curricular initiatives at the Bonner Center, contributed a chapter. The book is open access.

Hyman was also recently interviewed for an episode of the podcast, That Shakespeare Life, about her research on jacquemarts, clockworks, and automatons in the Renaissance.

Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature Wendy Beth Hyman gave an invited talk, "Teaching Titus Andronicus when Sexual Violence is on the World Stage," in Cape Town, South Africa, at the Shakespeare and Social Justice conference. She also spoke on the conference roundtable dedicated to books in the field, introducing her co-edited collection, Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press in October 2019.

Wendy Beth Hyman, associate professor of English and comparative literature, has published a monograph, Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry (Oxford UP, 2019) and an article, “Seeing the Invisible Under the Microscope: Natural Philosophy and John Donne’s Flea” in Philological Quarterly 98.1-2 (Spring/Winter 2019): 157-180.

Associate Professor of English Wendy Hyman has spent the 2015-16 academic year on research status, working at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin, and the Huntington Library, completing a book manuscript entitled Carpe Diem: Desire, Impossibility, and Renaissance Poetry.

A recent article, “‘Deductions from metaphors’: Figurative Truth, Poetical Language, and Early Modern Science,” appears in The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature, Science, and Culture (forthcoming, 2016). Hyman also contributed an essay, “Embodying Rome,” for the Luminary Digital Media edition of Julius Caesar. She has given two invited talks this year, at Rutgers University and Case Western University, and presented papers at the Modern Language Association and Shakespeare Association of America.

In the fall of 2015, she and the students of her senior seminar, Words and Things, curated an exhibit, “The Body: Looking in and Looking Out,” at the Allen Memorial Art Museum. Wendy Kozol, professor of comparative American studies, also provided curatorial assistance. This was the first time students in an English literature class at Oberlin curated a show at the museum, and Hyman would like to acknowledge the invaluable help of the museum staff, as well as a Mellon-funded Curriculum Development Grant, to expand the museum’s place in this seminar and her teaching more broadly.

Associate Professor of English Wendy Hyman recently published two essays: “‘For now hath time made me his numbering clock’: Shakespeare’s Jacquemarts," in Early Theatre and “Physics, Metaphysics, and Religion in Lyric Poetry,” in the Blackwell Companion to British Literature. Her work in literature and the history of science has also resulted in several talks, including “A Bawd for Figure: Form and Motion in Poetic Making,” at the 2014 Modern Language Association (MLA), and“Arcimboldo’s Post-human Assemblages,” at the Society for Literature and Science in the Arts in October 2013. She gave an invited talk, “Breaking the Sonnet,” at the Hiram College Bissell Symposium in February 2014, participated in the Visual Studies and the Liberal Arts Symposium at Smith College in May 2014, and led a seminar called "Words and Things" at the Shakespeare Association of America in March 2014, inspired by an Oberlin course she teaches by the same title.