Katherine Williams

I work in and across the fields of early modern English drama, critical disability studies, and theatre and performance studies. My first book, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater (Cornell, 2021; paperback 2026), shows how disability is a resource for performance and central to emerging conventions of theatrical form in early modern England. Unfixable Forms was awarded an Honorable Mention for the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society’s David Bevington Award for the best new book in early drama studies (2022), an Honorable Mention for the Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (2022); it was short-listed as finalist for the American Society for Theatre Research’s Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History (2022) and Shakespeare Globe First Book Award (2023).

Other writing on topics such as dramatic character and memetic repetition, crip time as theatrical temporality, and global adaptations of Shakespeare’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary History, English Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, Early Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and several edited collections. I edited the 1605 play Eastward Ho, by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, for The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, edited by Jeremy Lopez (Routledge, 2020), and am currently editing Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part 2 for the Cambridge Shakespeare Editions.

As scholar and dramaturg, I maintain an active practice of artistic collaboration focused on access aesthetics. From 2023-25, I was Co-Artistic Lead (Scholar and Dramaturg) of The Apothetae Residency, with Gregg Mozgala and Kim Weild, at The Public Theater (NYC). With collaborators Andrew Morrill, Alexandria Wailes, and Kim Weild, I’m currently at work on the SSHRC-funded research project “Shakespeare and ASL Poetics: Translation, Artistry, and Theatrical Possibility.” I am also PI for a SSHRC-funded archival project, “Representing Disability Histories,” on disability summer camping programs in the first half of the 20th century.

At present, I’m completing a book on crip artistry in contemporary productions entitled Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Disability. I’m also working on a book-length research project on the early modern history play without Shakespeare, as well as chapters on Christopher Marlowe and disability for the Oxford Handbook of Christopher Marlowe and a chapter on disability and asexuality for Early Modern Asexualities (Cornell, 2027). With Elizabeth B. Bearden, I am co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Disability and The Oxford Handbook of Disability and Literatures in English: 1500–1700.

Publications

Books

Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater. Cornell University Press, 2021 (paperback, 2026).

Edition (Text and Introduction): George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, Eastward Ho (1605). The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, edited by Jeremy Lopez (Routledge, 2020).

Edited Volume: Editorial introduction and special issue, “Disability Performance and Global Shakespeare,” featuring full-length articles from eight contributors, The Shakespearean International Yearbook, general editors Alexa Alice Joubin and Natalya Khomenko, (2024).

Articles and Book Chapters

“Forms of Reading Crip Time: Look About You and Jjjjjerome Ellis’s transCRIPted.” Literary Form After Matter 1550-1700: Experiments in Close Reading, edited by Katherine Hunt and Dianne Mitchell (Edinburgh University Press, 2026).

"Performing Shakespeare, Rewriting Disability." Shakespeare Bulletin 39.4 (2022): 637-50.

"Disability Representation and Theatrical Form in The Changeling and The Nice Valour." The Changeling: The State of Play, edited by Gordan McMullan and Kelly J. Stage (Arden, 2022), 157-86.

"Character as Meme." Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 21.2 (2021): 54-83.

"Disability Studies." The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism, edited by Evelyn Gajowski (Arden, 2020).

"Demonstrable Disability." Early Theatre 22, no. 2 (2019): 185-97.

Honorable Mention, "Innovative Article Award," Shakespeare Association of America (2021)

"‘More legs than Nature gave thee': Performing the Cripple in The Fair Maid of the Exchange." ELH 82.2 (Summer 2015): 491-519.

"‘Strange Virtue': Staging Acts of Cure." In Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, edited by Sujata Iyengar (Routledge, 2014).

"Performing Disability and Theorizing Deformity." In "Shakespeare and Theory" special issue, Vol. II, edited by François-Xavier Gleyzon and Johann Gregory. English Studies 94.7 (Fall 2013): 757-772. 

Reprinted in Shakespeare and the Future of Theory, edited by François-Xavier Gleyzon and Johann Gregory (Routledge, 2016).

"Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III." In "Disabled Shakespeares" special section, edited by Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood. Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009).

Other Writing

"Representations of Richard." Program note for the Donmar Warehouse production of Teenage Dick by Mike Lew. World premiere in London, UK. 6 December 2019 - 1 February 2020.

Co-author of "Come Hither, Actors: Textuality/Temporality/Materiality/Physicality." Linked series of collaborative posts by members of the "What Acting Is" seminar, led by Joseph R. Roach, at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Collation. 14 February - 6 March 2019

"Bedouin Shakespeare Company's ‘The Tempest.'" Entry on Shakespeare production in the United Arab Emirates in the quatercentenary year for Performance Shakespeare 2016 (2017).

"Richard III and the Staging of Disability." Article commissioned by the British Library for "Discovering Literature: Shakespeare" web resource. (2016).