Kathryn Schwarz

Professor

Kathryn Schwarz received her Ph.D. in English language and literature from Harvard University in 1994. Since coming to Vanderbilt in 1996, she has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on Renaissance drama, Shakespearean sexualities, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prose fictions, feminist and queer theories, embodiment and social subjectivity, gender and ideology, revenge tragedy, travel narrative, and chivalric romance.

Schwarz served as Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department from 2007 to 2010, and is currently Associate Chair. She has also served on the Program Committee, Application Review Committee, and Central Executive Committee of the Folger Shakespeare Institute; the MLA Executive Committee on Gay Studies; the Program Committee of the Shakespeare Association of America; and the Editorial Board of Shakespeare Quarterly.

Schwarz's first book, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance, was published by Duke University Press in 2000, and was awarded the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize for Literature by the Sixteenth Century Studies Society and Conference in 2001. Focusing on the works of Ralegh, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Jonson, Tough Love examines representations of Amazons in the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean exploration narratives, political polemics, medical texts, conduct manuals and exemplary catalogues. The book argues that, rather than describing spaces of exotic fantasy, Amazonian narratives instead provide ways of talking about sexuality, domesticity and gender roles in the early modern period.

Her second book, What You Will: Gender, Contract, and Shakespearean Social Space, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2011. The book traces a curious pattern in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representations of femininity: women pose a threat when they willingly conform to social conventions. Exemplary texts describe chaste women who kill their rapists, constant wives who make marriage a debilitating obligation, and devoted mothers who destroy the fitness of children. These cautionary tales draw attention to the more ordinary, necessary choices that take prescribed roles as a mandate for purposeful acts. For early modern narratives, intentional compliance poses a complex problem: it sustains crucial tenets of order and continuity, but unsettles the hierarchical premises from which those tenets derive. Feminine will appears as a volatile force within heterosociality, lending contingent security to a system that depends less on enforced obedience than it does on contract and consent.

Schwarz's current project, Disposable Bodies, Provisional Lives, begins with an article of faith so basic as to be nearly invisible: effective intention constitutes viable subjects. Disposable Bodies traces this assumption as it subtends social identities and contracts, and focuses on the possibilities it attempts to occlude. In brief, the project is concerned with the conflict between intentional jurisdiction and bodily capacity, which threatens to make the embodied subject a contradiction in terms. Strategies that define the body as an instrument assert that rational purpose imposes meaning on unruly flesh, and forge contracts that sustain social integrity through the use of transient bodies. If this system produces the exclusions and abjections that motivate ideological critique, it also interlocks disposable persons and privileged subjects within sociality itself. Collective priorities mediate but do not protect against the treacherous faculties of embodiment: to nurture disease, to succumb to desire, to be in peril or out of place, to die. These faculties exceed the reach of proprietary intent, and locate the body in a transactional, mutable, and dangerous intimacy with eventualities that defy control. Of course we know this, but what stories do we tell to manage that knowledge? As counterfactual histories and futurities erupt into providential rationales, how do the rigid demands of social self-perpetuation intersect the chaotic bodies that must answer those demands, but do not coincide with their sense?