Jennifer Thorup Birkett

Research and teaching interests

Jennifer Birkett is a Postdoctoral Fellow with Shakespeare at Notre Dame. She researches early modern drama with a specific interest in terms of endearment and the relationship between text and performance. Her scholarship characteristically magnifies quirky details and contradictions in order to arrive at new affordances. She is deeply committed to empowering female voices within dramatic narratives and combatting gender inequality by championing mutuality and solidarity.

While a graduate student at Notre Dame, Jennifer worked as a managing editor for the Religion & Literature journal, co-directed the Early Modern Circle, and served as Social and Professionalization chairs for EGSA. She has taught multiple sections of Writing and Rhetoric, Shakespeare and Performance, and Intro to Film and Television.

Representative publications

Early Modern Drama and Terms of Endearment. 2023. University of Notre Dame, Ph.D. dissertation. 

 “‘Wedded to Strange Singularities’: Margaret Cavendish’s Natural Philosophy on Marriage.” Forthcoming in Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, Fall 2023.

“Dy(e)ing Hands: The Hennaed Female Agent in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Tragedies.” Women and Indian Shakespeares edited by Thea Buckley, Mark Thornton Burnett, Sangeeta Datta and Rosa García-Periago, 167–84, London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2022.

Bibliography of Scholarship for Cavendish Studies, revised, updated, and edited with B. R. Siegfried and Sylvia Cutler. International Margaret Cavendish Society Website, 2018, at http://digitalcavendish.org/resources/margaret-cavendish-bibliography-initiative/