The Program in Sexuality Studies at Duke

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

Expertise:
Renaissance/Early Modern Literature
Literary & Cultural Criticism
Medicine and Literature
Dramatic Literature
Gender & Sexuality Studies
Law and Literature

Current projects: Zoographies of Knowledge: Animal Agency and the Early Modern Constitution;, , 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)

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

1. Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (2002), University of Chicago Press .
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, in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, edited by Cathy Shrank and Mike Pincombe ((forthcoming, 2009)), Oxford University Press .
4. Invisible Parts: Animals and the Renaissance Anatomies of Human Exceptionalism, in Animal Encounters, edited by Manuela Rossini and Tom Tyler ((forthcoming, 2008)), Leiden, NL: Brill Publishers .
5. Lear's Queer Cosmos, in Shakesqueer, edited by Madhavi Menon ((forthcoming, 2009)), Duke University Press .
6. Poetic Companies: Musters of Agency in George Gascoigne's 'Friendly Verse', GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, vol. 10 no. 3 (Spring, 2004), pp. 453-483 .
7. La chatte de Montaigne, in Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne, edited by Philippe Desan, (trans. Marc Schachter) (2004), Paris: Editions Champion .

Research Description: Laurie Shannon specializes in English literature of "the long sixteenth century," from the rise of the printed book in the late 1400s to the beheading of Charles I in 1649. She is author of Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago, 2002). Sovereign Amity concerns matters of agency, bureaucracy, gender, consent, and sexuality in early modernity's appropriation of classical friendship principles. It pursues a persistent opposition between the friendship pair (as a utopian experiment in "micro-polity") and more systemic institutions of the "body politic" and monarchy, proposing an adversarial yet linked evolution for self-governing subjects and statist authority.

Shannon's current book project extends these constitutionalist questions beyond the confines of a single species. It delves into the connections between histories of science, medicine, law, literature, and philosophy (as core human modes of knowledge and political imagination) and animal representation. The Zootopian Constitution: Animal Sovereignty and Early Modern Knowledge 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 "animal sovereignty" to name the kind of authority persistently granted to animals in the larger "zootopian constitution" of knowledge -- a polity in which membership and participation are not confined by a (then emergent and now obsolete) human limit.

Papers underway include "Montaigne's Cat," "Actaeon's Coat: Zoographies of the Body's Edge," "Animotion: The Course of Kind in Renaissance Natural History," "Hang-Dog Looks: Animal Trials and Early Modern Zoopolity," "Galen's Monkeys, Vesalian Man, and Harvey's Zootopian Cardiology," "'In the Crany of the Beast': The Invisible Anatomies of Human Exceptionalism," and "The Law's First Subjects -- or Abjects." Shannon is also at work on Of English Dogges: Early Modern Canines in Print, an edition of John Caius' 1576 text, which was the first English encyclopedia of dog breeds, as well as a broader manuscript on animal actors, entitled "What the Tiger Meant, and Other Tales of Animal Intention." Her essays have appeared in English Literary Renaissance, ELH, SAQ, Renaissance Drama, Shakespeare Studies, Modern Philology, GLQ, and American Literature.

At Duke, Shannon has served as Director of the Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies. She received the Robert B. Cox Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2003 and the Dean's Award for Graduate Mentoring in 2007; she was named E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English in 2004. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and (presently) the Guggenheim Foundation.

Areas of Interest:
Early Modern Literature and Culture
Shakespeare
Gender and Sexuality Studies
Political Thought
Science Studies
History of Medicine