Karen Newman papers (Ms.2011.040)

Biographical / Historical

Karen Newman is the Owen Walker Professor of Humanities, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Professor of English at Brown University. A nationally known scholar of Shakespeare, early modern literature, and Renaissance drama, Newman's academic interests focus on Shakespeare, early modern letters and cultures, literary theory, and gender studies. In her writing, Newman engages questions of the globalization of culture and cultural translation, representations of gender in early modern cultures and texts, and the politics of reproduction, among others.

Newman earned her B.A. in English from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in 1970, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Comparative Literature from the University of California-Berkeley in 1972 and 1978, respectively. Newman has held various appointments at Harvard University, the Johns Hopkins University, and Williams College, and professorships at New York University and Brown University. She has taught courses on Shakespeare, British literature, 17th-century drama, Renaissance literature and cultural studies, the theory of literature, feminist theory, histories of the early modern body, and writing and gender, among other topics.

A prolific writer and lecturer, Newman has published and translated extensively. In 1985, Newman published her first book, Shakespeare's Rhetoric of Comic Character: Dramatic Convention in Classical and Renaissance Comedy. In it, Neman revises the history of comic characterization, expanding the analysis of the comic dramatist to a comic tradition that stretches back prior to Shakespeare. In her next work, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama, Newman examines representations of women on stage and in printed materials to show the construction of the gendered subject and femininity in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. In Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality, she traces the history of fetal images from the 16th century, arguing that modes of visualizing science have profoundly determined the "fetal politics" of contemporary abortion debates. In her next book, Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris, Newman delves into literary and cultural theory, and challenges the notion of a rupture between premodern and modern societies. She shows the continuity of themes of capital, commodity, crowd, traffic, and the street in early modern London and Paris and explores the impact of rapid urbanization on cultural production. Her most recent book, Essaying Shakespeare, is a collection of her essays on Shakespeare. She incorporates new historicism, gender studies, critical race studies, and globalization in her comprehensive analysis of how changing theoretical trends have shaped Shakespeare studies.

From 1987 to 1993 Newman served as director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, where she developed and directed a series of yearlong seminars and interdisciplinary lectures and workshops involving post-doctoral fellows, Brown faculty, and graduate students. From 2002-2005 Newman was dean of the Graduate School at Brown University. She has held a wide range of academic appointments, including chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Newman also has held affiliations and positions in numerous professional organizations, including the Shakespeare Association of America, the Renaissance Society of America, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the Modern Language Association of America.

Newman is the recipient of numerous fellowships, grants, and awards from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, the Folger Library, and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others.