Sarah BeckwithSarah Beckwith  
Professor of English and Professor of Theater Studies

Office Location: 315A Allen Building
Office Phone: (919) 684-8705
Email Address: sarah.beckwith@duke.edu

Office Hours:

Fall 2012
On Leave

Education:

Ph.D., King's College, London University

B.A. with Honors, Oxford University
Specialties:

Medieval Literature
Renaissance/Early Modern Literature
Sarah Beckwith works on late medieval religious writing, medieval and early modern drama, and ordinary language philosophy. She is the author of Christ's Body: Identity, Religion and Society in Medieval English Writing (London: Routledge, 1993, pbk 1996); Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in York's Play of Corpus Christi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, pbk 2003), and Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011, pbk 2013). She is currently working on a book about Shakespearean tragedy and about philosophy's love affair with the genre of tragedy and The Book of Second Chances, a book about versions of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. She co-edited JMEMS for several years, and co-founded the book series Re-Formations with the University of Notre Dame Press and is the editor of numerous collections of essays and journals.

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

  1.  Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in York's Play of Corpus Christi. U of Chicago P, 2001, Paperback ed. 2003.
  2.  Christ's Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings. Routledge, 1996.
  3.  JMEMS.  Jan. 2003
  4. with D. Aers, eds.. Sacrifice: Medieval and Early Modern. JMEMS, special issue 31.3 (Fall, 2001).
  5.  The Cultural Work of Medieval Theatre: Ritual Practice in England 1350-1600. JMEMS, special issue 29.1 (Winter, 1999).
  6.  Catholicism and Catholicity: Eucharistic Communities in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Modern Theology 15.2 (Mar. 1999). (based on conference being held at Duke, April 17-19, under auspices of the Homeland Foundation)
  7. "Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet and the Forms of Oblivion." JMEMS  (Jan. 2003)  8000 words
  8. "Absent Presences: Resurrection Theatre in York." Festschrift for Derek Pearsall. Ed. D. Aers, Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer.  2000.