Department of English

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.