Theater Studies

Sarah Beckwith, Marcello Lotti Professor of English and Professor of Theater Studies

Research Interests:: Sarah Beckwith (Ph.D., University of London) has worked at the University of East Anglia and the University of Pittsburgh. Her chief interests are in late medieval religious culture, especially culture in performance. Her publications include work on medieval mysticism and gender, Corpus Christi theatre, sacramental culture, and ritual theory and practice. Her first book, Christ’s Body was published by Routledge in 1993 (paperback, 1996). Her book Signifying God: Social Act and Symbolic Relation in the York Corpus Christi Play was published by the University of Chicago in November 2001. She is currently working on the interrelationship between church and theater as performative cultures in the transition from medieval to early modern theatre.

Education:

Ph.D.	King's College, London University	1992
B.A. with Honors	Oxford University	1981

Representative Publications (More Publications)

Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in York's Play of Corpus Christi. U of Chicago P, (2001, Paperback ed. 2003).
Christ's Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings. Routledge, (1996).
JMEMS (Jan. 2003) .
with D. Aers, eds., Sacrifice: Medieval and Early Modern, JMEMS, special issue, vol. 31 no. 3 (Fall, 2001) .
The Cultural Work of Medieval Theatre: Ritual Practice in England 1350-1600, JMEMS, special issue, vol. 29 no. 1 (Winter, 1999) .
Catholicism and Catholicity: Eucharistic Communities in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Modern Theology, vol. 15 no. 2 (Mar. 1999) (based on conference being held at Duke, April 17-19, under auspices of the Homeland Foundation.) .
Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet and the Forms of Oblivion, JMEMS (Jan. 2003) (8000 words.) .
Absent Presences: Resurrection Theatre in York, in Festschrift for Derek Pearsall, edited by D. Aers, Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer (2000) .