Laurie Shannon, English and Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Contact Info:

I have joined the English Department at Northwestern University; my new email address is
l-shannon@northwestern.edu.

L A U R I E S H A N N O N
Wender-Lewis Associate Professor of English
University Hall 215 ~~~ 1897 Sheridan Road
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208
http://www.english.northwestern.edu/people/shannon.html

Office Location:	311 Allen
Email Address:
Web Page:

Education:

Ph.D.	University of Chicago, 1996	1996
J.D.	Harvard Law School, 1989	1989
M.A.	University of Chicago	1985
B.A., summa cum laude	University of Delaware	1984

Specialties:

Renaissance Literature
Literary & Cultural Criticism
Literature and Medicine
Dramatic Literature
Gender & Sexuality Studies
Literature and Law

Research Interests:

Renaissance Literature & Culture; Shakespeare; Animal Studies (especially topics in political thought, natural history, medicine, and gender & sexuality studies)

Current projects: Zoographies of Knowledge: Animal Sovereignty and Human Sciences before la Bête Machine and Of English Dogges, the diversities, the names, the natures and the properties (1570; 1576) (a critical edition of the first book taxonomizing dog breeds in English)

Laurie Shannon specializes in the literature of "the long sixteenth century" in England, from the beginnings of the printed book in the late 1400s until the beheading of Charles I in 1649. She is the author of Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (U of Chicago Press, 2002). Sovereign Amity concerns matters of agency, bureaucracy, gender, consent, and sexuality in early modernity's appropriation of classical friendship principles. It pursues the uncanny relations between the friendship pair (as an experiment in "micro-polity") and the more systemic institutions of the "body politic" and monarchy, proposing an almost hostile co-evolution for individualist autonomy and royal/proto-statist authority.

Shannon's current research extends the constitutionalist question at the heart of friendship theory and concerns animal studies, the history of science, and literature. A book project, Zoographies of Knowledge: Animal Sovereignty and Human Sciences before la Bête Machine, engages the history of classificatory thought by taking up the role of animal variation or "kyndes" to investigate the species concept -- in an era so often credited (and discredited) with an invention of the human. It proposes the concept of "ecopolity" to envision a larger constitution, one not confined by the (then emergent and now obsolete) human limit. Papers underway at the moment include "Actaeon's Coat: The Early Modern Zoography of the Body's Edge," "Animotion: The Course of Kind in Renaissance Natural History," and "Hang-Dog Looks: Animal Trials and Early Modern Ecopolity." As a related part of this inquiry, Shannon is also at work on an edition of John Caius's Of English Dogges (1576), the first book to taxonomize dog breeds in English. Her essays have appeared in English Literary Renaissance, ELH, SAQ, Renaissance Drama, Shakespeare Studies, Modern Philology, GLQ, and American Literature.

At Duke, Shannon serves on the Executive Committee of the Academic Council, as the university's representative on the Central Executive Committee of the Folger Institute in Washington, DC and as Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She received the Robert B. Cox Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2003 and was named E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English in 2004.

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

1.  Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts. University of Chicago Press, 2002.
2. "Poor, Bare, Forked: Human Negative Exceptionalism, Animal Sovereignty, and the Natural History of King Lear."    (in progress)
3. "Minerva's Men: Horizontal Nationhood and the Literary Production of Googe, Turberville and Gascoigne." The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature. Ed. Cathy Shrank and Mike Pincombe. Oxford University Press, (forthcoming, 2009).
4. "Invisible Parts: Animals and the Renaissance Anatomies of Human Exceptionalism." Animal Encounters. Ed. Manuela Rossini and Tom Tyler. Leiden, NL: Brill Publishers, (forthcoming, 2008).
5. "Lear's Queer Cosmos." Shakesqueer. Ed. Madhavi Menon. Duke University Press, (forthcoming, 2009).
6. "Poetic Companies: Musters of Agency in George Gascoigne's 'Friendly Verse'." GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 10.3 (Spring, 2004): 453-483.
7. "La chatte de Montaigne." Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne. Ed. Philippe Desan, (trans. Marc Schachter). Paris: Editions Champion, 2004.