Wall Named Avalon Foundation Professor

Professor selected to give annual Folger Shakespeare Library Birthday lecture

November 4, 2011 | by Jasmine Rangel

EVANSTON, Ill. –Wendy Wall, professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, has been named the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities.

A specialist in early modern literature and culture, Wall has published articles on topics as wide-ranging as Shakespeare, Renaissance poetry, the history of authorship, editorial theory, gender, national identity, theatrical practice, domesticity, food studies and Jell-O. She is working on a book tentatively titled “Strange Kitchens: Knowledge and Taste in Early Modern English Recipe Books.”

Wall is the author of “The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance” and “Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama.” The latter was a 2002 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award winner and a finalist for the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize.

Wall gives public lectures in conjunction with the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and with the Newberry Library in Chicago. A former trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, she co-edited Renaissance Drama from 1997 to 2005.

Wall is the recipient of numerous grants and awards for teaching and research, including a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, a Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship, a teaching award from Mortar Board, a Weinberg Distinguished Teaching Award and the Wender-Lewis Research and Teaching Professorship.