M. Lindsay Kaplan was born in Philadelphia and attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls. As an undergraduate she majored in English and received her B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University; her Ph.D. in English was awarded by the University of California at Berkeley.

A member of the Georgetown University English Department since 1993, Kaplan teaches courses on Shakespeare and early modern drama, focusing on a number of topics in early modern culture, including law, gender, race and religious difference; she also teaches a course on gender and the Hebrew Bible. She is the recipient of Georgetown academic grants, a Folger short-term fellowship, a grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Studies and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. She received an honorable mention from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, Best Essay, 1996, for her essay, “Subjection and Subjectivity: Jewish Law and Female Autonomy in Reformation English Marriage.”

Her teaching and research interests include: Shakespeare; Early Modern English literature and culture, with particular focus on race, gender and religion; Jews in medieval and Early Modern England; Bible as literature.

Her publications include essays on slander, women and slander; Jewish law and female subjectivity in early modern English culture; gender, race and religion in The Merchant of Venice. She edited Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002); co-edited Feminist Readings in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1996); and wrote The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997). She is currently working on a book on race, gender and the construction of Jewish identity in medieval and Early Modern English culture.