Linda Charnes

Linda Charnes specializes in Shakespeare Studies and early modern culture through the Restoration and long seventeenth century. Her research focuses on the uses of Shakespeare in the arenas of mass culture, literature, film, and contemporary international politics. Her other areas of expertise include Restoration literature, Milton, theoretical approaches to performativity, psychoanalysis and the performance of everyday life, political philosophy from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, and all areas of critical theory. Her first book, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare, showcased Shakespeare’s use of legendary figures to critique emerging problems of fame and notoriety. Her second book, Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium, traced the legacy of Shakespeare’s most famous princes—Hamlet and Hal—and their impact, covert and overt, on contemporary British and American politics and society. She is currently working on two new book projects: one on Milton and the political psychology of the post-Interregnum, and the other on Shakespearean performance and the impact of new interactive media on concepts such as “audience,” spectatorship, and performative identification.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Shakespeare and Renaissance studies; Shakespeare and Postmodernism, critical and cultural theories; feminist cultural studies; Early Modern Transatlantic and Restoration literatures; political philosophy and theories of democracy.

RECENT COURSES

Graduate:

Milton and the Libertines;
Shakespeare and the Fetish of Character;
Operation Enduring Shakespeare;
Politically Incorrect Shakespeare;
Milton and the Sublime Object;
Liberty and Political Psychology, 1594-1789;
Monarchy and Democracy: Theories of Cultural Inheritance 1558-1800;
Shakespeare and Postmodernism;
Shakespeare Wars: Critical Approaches to Shakespeare;
Reading the Irrational: Logics of Cultural Unreason;

Undergraduate topics seminars:

Milton, Politics and the Law;
Shakespeare and Democracy;
Shakespeare Y2K

PARTIAL LIST OF PUBLICATIONS

Books:
Hamlet's Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium, (Routledge) 2006.

Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare, (Harvard University Press) 1993.

Shakespeare and the Interactive Stage (in progress).

Articles:

"Extraordinary Renditions: Character and Place Reconsidered," in "Shakespeare After 9-11": Special Edition of Shakespeare Yearbook, forthcoming 2008.

"Shakespeare, and Belief, in the Future," in Presentist Shakespeares, Routledge, 2006.

"Reading for the Wormholes: Microperiods from the Future," Early Modern Culture, 2007.

"Uncivil Unions," in Presentism, Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Articles in Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Quarterly, Chaucer Review, Textual Practice

"The Two-Party System in Troilus and Cressida," in Companion to Shakespeare: Comedies and Romances (Blackwell, ed. Jean Howard and richard Dutton, 2003).

"The Two-Percent Solution: What Harold Bloom Forgot," in Harold Bloom's Shakespeare (Palgrave McMillan, eds. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, 2001).

Contributer to the Oxford Enclyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy (OUP, 2002).

"The Hamlet Formerly Known as Prince," in Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to the Millenium, edited by Hugh Grady, Routledge, 2000.

"We Were Never Early Modern," in Philosophical Shakespeares, edited by John Joughin, Routledge, 2000.

"Dismember Me: Shakespeare, Paranoia, and the Logic of Mass Culture," in Shakespeare Quarterly 48:1, Spring 1997.

"Styles That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Ideology Critique," in Shakespeare Studies, Vol.24, 1996.

Annual Public Lecture in Honor of Shakespeare's Birthday, at the Folger Elizabethan Theatre, April 1998. Lecture title: "The Hamlet Formerly Known as Prince."

SELECTED HONOR AND AWARDS

AAUW Fellow
IU Outstanding Junior Faculty Award (1993)
Finkelstein Fellow
Indiana University Teaching Excellence Recognition Award (twice)
Indiana University Trustee's Teaching Award

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Professor Charnes taught a seminar, entitled "Shakespeare and Postmodernism," at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1998. She has given numerous lectures, academic and public, on Shakespeare and contemporary American culture, at venues including the Folger Library, the National Gallery of Art, the World Shakespeare Congress, and the New Globe Theatre in London.

She was a consultant for the Arden Project: Synthetic Shakespearean World Initiative at Indiana University, funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

She was Director of Graduate Studies at I.U. Bloomington from 1997-2000.

She was Director of Graduate Job Placement from 1997-2007.

She is also a private pilot.