Joyce MacDonald

Education:
M. A. and Ph.D., Vanderbilt University

A. B., Dartmouth College
Biography:

My latest book, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory in the New World, was published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan. It explores my particular fascination with how race appears in early modern drama and how it can function in post-Renaissance responses to Shakespeare's plays and poems. I'm a former trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, and a current member of the editorial boards of the journals Shakespeare Studies and Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Next year, I'll be beginning a term on the executive committee of the Adaptation Studies Forum of the Modern Language Association, and was also just elected an executive committee member for the MLA Forum on Shakespeare. This summer, I submitted an introductory essay for a new edition of Toni Morrison's Desdemona (Bloomsbury, 2024), and I'm working on editing two early modern plays: Aphra Behn's Abdelazer, for the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series from University of Toronto Press, and my favorite Shakespeare play, Antony and Cleopatra, for Cambridge Shakespeare Editions. 

Research Interests:
Shakespeare
Performance
Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Literature and Culture
Race
Gender and Women's Writing
Recent and Upcoming Talks

"Unsettling Octavius in Antony and Cleopatra." Queen's University Belfast, June 2024.

"Black Magician: Danai Gurira's Richard III." Shakespeare Association of America,  April 2024.

"Lucy Negro in the Archive." Colloquium on Intersectional Lives in Early Modernity, The Folger Institute, November 2023.

"Universal Shakespeare? Shakespeare and the Poetics and Politics of Relevance." Huntington Library, May 2022.

"Actresses of Color and Shakespearean Performance." Shakespeare Unlimited podcast ( https://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/black-women-shakespeareans-macdonald), February 2022.

"Anti-Racist Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Measure for Measure." Shakespeare's Globe (London), December 2021.

 

Selected Publications:

Books:

  • Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
  • Shakespearean Adaptation, Memory, and Race in the New World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

​Articles and Book Chapters:

  • “Remembering Shakespeare's Sonnets in Caroline Randall Williams' Lucy Negro, Redux.” Forthcoming in  Shakespeare Survey 77, 2024.
  • "Shakespeare, Race, and Adaptation." In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, ed. Patricia Akhimie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 103-118.
  • "Interracial Sex and Narrative Crisis in The Woman of Colour." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 35.1 (2023)<https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:61ba8957-1ef3-346a-b74e-646e0d418bcf> 
  • "Disrupting White Genealogies in Cymbeline." In White People in Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Little, Jr. (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 137-149. 
  • "How Race Might Help Us Find 'Lost' Women's Writing." Criticism 63.1-2 (2021): 45-53.
  • "Actresses of Color and Shakespearean Performance: The Question of Reception." In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, ed. Ayanna Thompson (Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 208-222.
  • "'Love and Determination': Remaking Marriage in a Black Adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew." In 'The Taming of the Shrew': State of Play, ed. Heather Easterling and Jennifer Flaherty (Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2021), pp. 192-207.