Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich
Contact Information
Associate Professor
She/her/hers
Areas of Expertise
- Renaissance literature and culture
- Theater history
- Early modern women writers
- Shakespeare in performance, film, and pop culture
- Gender and sexuality
- History of the book and textual editing
Education
- PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign, 2009
Elizabeth Kolkovich specializes in early modern English drama and poetry, with interests in theories of gender and disability. She is writing an academic book about the history of staging masques in Shakespeare, titled “Strange Spectacles: Shakespeare’s Masques and Their Afterlives,” and a book for students about how gender was performed on Shakespeare’s all-male stage. She is also editing Much Ado About Nothing—her favorite Shakespeare play—for Cambridge Shakespeare Editions.
Additionally, her research explores how women shaped early modern literature and theater through writing and patronage. She is working on an open-access edition of Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (1613) for Digital Renaissance Editions and Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO), and (together with a class of undergraduate students) she made a documentary about the play called Looking for Mariam, 1613 that is freely available on YouTube. She continues to research women patrons of Renaissance drama and write about Hester Pulter’s seventeenth-century poetry, some of which she edited as part of The Pulter Project.
Kolkovich has won several awards and grants for her research and teaching, including fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare and Huntington libraries; the journal Early Theatre’s award for Best Article in Theatre History (for 2023-34); the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching (Ohio State’s highest teaching honor); the Paul W. Brown Excellence in Teaching Award; and Mansfield campus awards for Excellence in Scholarship, Excellence in Teaching, and Excellence in Service.
For updates on current projects, along with links to essays and teaching materials, please visit Kolkovich's website.
Selected Publications
- The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, and Gender. Cambridge UP, 2016; paperback reissue 2019.
- "Chaste, Fair, and Bountiful: Marston, Fletcher, and the Countess of Huntingdon's Patronage," Early Theatre, vol. 27, no. 1, 2024, pp. 77-104.
- “Female Masquers and Ambiguity in Timon of Athens.” Renaissance Drama, vol. 51, no. 2, December 2023, pp. 135-50.
- “In Defense of Indulgence: Hester Pulter’s Jane Elegies.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (JEMCS), vol. 20, no. 2, 2020, pp. 43-70.
- “Queering Poins: Masculinity and Friendship in Henry IV, The Hollow Crown, and the RSC’s ‘King and Country.’” Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 36, no. 4, 2018, pp. 635-56.