Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Aspects of Theory
- Renaissance Literature
Areas of Interest
- 16th and 17th century English literature, especially Shakespeare and early modern drama
- Critical disability studies
- Renaissance history of medicine
- Performance theory
- Global Shakespeare
Biography
Dr. Katherine Schaap Williams is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. Her writing-on topics such as disability in the early modern theatre, dramatic character as memetic repetition, crip temporalities in early modern performance, and contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare's plays-has been published or is forthcoming in English Literary History, English Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, Early Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and several edited collections. She 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).
Her monograph, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater, was published by Cornell University Press in 2021. In 2022, 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, and an Honorable Mention for the Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
She is currently at work on several projects: an edition of Shakespeare's King Henry IV, Part 2 for the Cambridge Shakespeare Editions; essays about early modern disability and the formal constraints of closet drama, and about the early modern history play without Shakespeare; and a new book on disability, kingly bodies, and early modern discourses of sovereignty.
Publications
Books
Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater. Cornell University Press, 2021.
Edition and scholarly introduction, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, Eastward Ho (1605). The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, edited by Jeremy Lopez (Routledge, 2020).
Articles and Book Chapters
"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).