"Bodytalk": Voice and Movement in Premodern Literature

A conversation between ACMRS Short Term Residents Alani Hicks-Bartlett (Brown University) and Elisa Oh (Howard University), discussing some of their current research. Hicks-Bartlett works on disability in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, as well as voice, gender, violence, and questions of embodiment in Medieval French and Italian literature, and in Early Modern French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and English tragedy, and lyric and epic poetry. Oh works on women's silences and the "choreographies," or repeated kinetic patterns, that construct raced and gendered difference in early modern English drama.
About Alani Hicks-Bartlett
Alani Hicks-Bartlett is assistant professor of comparative literature, French and francophone studies, and Hispanic studies at Brown University, with affiliations in the programs in early cultures, dedieval studies, and the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World. Her teaching and research interests center around gender, violence, and race in medieval and early modern English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese literatures. In addition to articles on Ariosto, Christine de Pizan, Montaigne, Shakespeare and Cervantes, she has recently published on disability, race, citational practice, and authorial voice in theater, and lyric and epic poetry.
About Elisa Oh
Elisa Oh is an associate professor in the English department at Howard University. Her research interests are sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and culture that broaden our knowledge of race-making and gender, then and now. Looking at Shakespeare, Wroth, Cary, and Jacobean dramatists, she studies women's silences, court masques' colonial power politics, stage witches' dances, and travel narratives' accounts of early encounters with African and Indigenous American communities. Her research has appeared in English Literary Renaissance, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, and Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World. Forthcoming essays will appear in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race (2023) and Situating Shakespeare Pedagogy in Higher Education: Social Justice and Institutional Contexts (2023). Her research is supported by an Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Short-Term Residency, a Folger Shakespeare Institute Non-Residential Research Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Award. Her book project is entitled Choreographies of Race and Gender: Dance, Travel, and Ritual in Early Modern English Literature 1558-1668.
The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) was established in 1981 by the Arizona Board of Regents as a state-wide, tri-university research unit that bridges the intellectual communities at Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Arizona. Located centrally on the campus of Arizona State University, ACMRS is charged with coordinating and stimulating interdisciplinary research about medieval and early modern literature and culture.
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