Michelle Dowd is Hudson Strode Professor of English and Director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies. From 2023 to 2026 she was also the Marilyn Williams Elmore and John Durr Elmore Professor of English. She received her BA summa cum laude from the University of Rochester in 1997 and her PhD from Columbia University in 2003. She specializes in early modern literature, with concentrations in Tudor and Stuart drama, Shakespeare, and early modern women’s writing. Her additional teaching and research interests include early modern theater culture, genre studies and formalism, feminist theory and gender studies, economic criticism, and early modern religious culture.

Professor Dowd’s first monograph, Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2009), won the Sara A. Whaley Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association. Her second monograph, The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge, 2015) offers a new understanding of how the theater, England’s most vibrant cultural institution in the Renaissance, shaped attitudes about primogeniture, one of the country’s most longstanding economic systems. With Lara Dodds, she is the author of Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Future of Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2025), which won the Award for Best Collaborative Project from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender and was shortlisted for the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize for the Best Book in Renaissance Studies from the Renaissance Society of America. This book provides a synthesis and reassessment of the state of the field for early modern women’s writing and argues that a full accounting of early modern women’s literary and creative activities is necessary to the future of literary studies as a broader field.

Most recently, she has published Shakespeare and Work (Oxford University Press, 2026) as part of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series. This book introduces readers to the vibrant working world of Shakespeare’s plays and demonstrates that we can come to a richer understanding of Shakespeare’s dramatic output and cultural legacy if we attend to how the everyday world of work shapes both the action and the language of his plays.

Professor Dowd also edits a book series, Strode Studies in Early Modern Literature and Culture, published by the University of Alabama Press. She has held fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (at the Newberry Library).

Before coming to Alabama, Professor Dowd taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and at Fordham University.

Selected Publications

Monographs

• Shakespeare and Work. Oxford Shakespeare Topics. Oxford University Press, 2026.
• Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Future of Literary History (with Lara Dodds). Oxford University Press, 2025.
• The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Edited Books

• The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama: Perspectives on Culture, Performance and Identity, ed. with Tom Rutter. Bloomsbury/Arden Press, 2023.
• Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing: Readings, Conversations, Pedagogies, ed. with Lara Dodds. University of Nebraska Press, 2022.
• Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater, ed. with Ronda Arab and Adam Zucker. Routledge, 2015.
• Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology, ed. with Thomas Festa. Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2012.
• Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, ed. with Natasha Korda. Ashgate, 2011.
• Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, ed. with Julie A. Eckerle. Ashgate, 2007

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

• “Pastoral Economies: Reimagining Global Capitalism through Female Retreat in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish and Dorothy Calthorpe.” Part of a special issue on “Challenging Frameworks of Knowledge: Early Modern Women’s Writings at Work” edited by Mihoko Suzuki and Megan Matchinske. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 23.3-4 (2023 [published in 2025]): 60-80.
• “Untimely Developments: Periodization, Early Modern Women’s Writing, and Literary History.” Invited chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540-1700, ed. Danielle Clarke, Sarah C.E. Ross, and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, 735-48. Oxford University Press, 2022.
• “Exquisitely Compatible: Blending Feminism and Formalism in the Classroom.” Part of a special issue of “Teaching Early Modern Women Writers Today,” edited by Liza Blake. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (SMART) 28.2 (2021):  31-40.
• “Risky Business: Con Artists, Speculation, and Inheritance in Early Modern English Drama.” Part of a special issue on “Inheritance Law and Literature” edited by Beth Cortese and Jakob Ladegaard. Law and Literature 35.1 (Published online 8 April 2021; print publication 2023): 11-29. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1535685X.2021.1902637
• “Happy Accidents: Critical Belatedness, Feminist Formalism, and Early Modern Women’s Writing.” Co-authored with Lara Dodds. Criticism 62.2 (2020): 169-93.
• “Shakespeare and Genre Studies.”  In The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism, ed. Evelyn Gajowski, 38-50. London: Bloomsbury/Arden Press, 2020.
• “Breaking Form in Early Modern Literary Studies.”  Invited essay for the 50^th Anniversary issue of English Literary Renaissance. 50.1 (2020): 40-6.
• “Judith Shakespeare’s Brother.”  Modern Language Quarterly 80.1 (2019): 51-74.
• “So like an old tale”: Staging Inheritance and the Lost Child in Shakespeare’s Romances.” In Staged Normality in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Rory Loughnane and Edel Semple, 173-92.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
• “Gender and Genre: Shakespeare’s Comic Women.”  In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Heather Hirschfeld, 328-41. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
• “The Case for a Feminist Return to Form.” Co-authored with Lara Dodds. Forum on “Rethinking Methodologies for Early Modern Women’s Studies.” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13.1 (2018): 82-91.
• “Navigating the Future of Early Modern Women’s Writing: Pedagogy, Feminism, and Literary Theory.” In Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, ed. Merry Wiesner-Hanks. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018.  261-82.
• “Dramaturgy and the Politics of Space in The Tragedy of Mariam.” Renaissance Drama 44.1 (2016): 101-22.
• “Afterword.”  Special Issue on “Women’s Writing/Women’s Work in Early Modernity.” Early Modern Studies Journal 6 (2014): 194-202.
• “A Gentleman May Wander: Inheritance, Travel, and the Prodigal Son on the Jacobean Stage.” Renaissance Drama 42.1 (2014): 113-37.
• “Shakespeare’s Sleeping Workers.”  Shakespeare Studies 41 (2013): 148-76.
• “Genealogical Counternarratives in the Writings of Mary Carey.” Modern Philology 109.4 (2012): 440-64.
• “The Devotional Writings of Dorothy Calthorpe” (with Julie A. Eckerle).  ANQ 24.1-2 (2011): 89-98.
• “‘Order plays the soul’: Anne Clifford, The Temple, and the Spiritual Logic of Housework.” In George Herbert’s Travels: International Print and Cultural Legacies, ed. Christopher Hodgkins.  Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011.  59-77.
• “Recent Studies in Early Modern Life Writing” (with Julie A. Eckerle). English Literary Renaissance 40.1 (2010): 132-62.
• “Shakespeare and Work.” Literature Compass 7.3 (2010): 185-94.
• “Delinquent Pedigrees: Revision, Lineage, and Spatial Rhetoric in The Duchess of Malfi.” English Literary Renaissance 39.3 (2009): 499-526.
• “Labors of Love: Women, Marriage, and Service in Twelfth Night and The Compleat Servant-Maid.” Shakespearean International Yearbook 5 (2005): 103-26.
• “Leaning Too Hard Upon the Pen: Suburb Wenches and City Wives in Westward Ho.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 15 (2003): 224-42.

Selected Awards and Honors

• Marilyn Williams Elmore and John Durr Elmore Endowed Professorship, 2023-2026
• Shortlist, Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize for the Best Book in Renaissance Studies from the Renaissance Society of America for Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Future of Literary History, co-authored with Lara Dodds, 2026
• Award for Best Collaborative Project from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender for Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Future of Literary History, co-authored with Lara Dodds, 2025
• Award for Best Article from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender for “Happy Accidents: Critical Belatedness, Feminist Formalism, and Early Modern Women’s Writing,” co-authored with Lara Dodds, 2021
• Award for Best Teaching Edition from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender for Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology, 2013
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Newberry Library, 2012-2013
• Sara A. Whaley Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association for Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, 2009
• Grant-in-Aid, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2001 and 2009
• Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Long-Term Fellowship, Huntington Library, 2006-2007
• Center for Humanistic Inquiry Fellowship, Emory University, 2006-2007 (declined)
• Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, 1997-1998