Contact: deh2@hawaii.edu
I am a new member of faculty, joining the department as an Assistant professor in fall 2017. My primary teaching and research interests are late medieval and early modern English literary cultures, queer theory/gender studies, and contemporary queer African literatures. I am especially interested in interrelations between literature, sexuality, and economics, both in the past and present. Currently, I am finishing my first book manuscript entitled Winners and Wasters: Profit, Pleasure, and Plays in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, which examines the ways that late medieval and early modern drama represents the commercialization of England’s economy as well as the socio-cultural consequences that this economic transformation has on the social order and individual identities, especially gender and sexual identities. I also have begun preliminary research on a second book project, Continental Connections, a project that explores the intertwining of race and sexuality in seventeenth-century texts, such as poetry, drama, and treatises, that represent different parts of Africa, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific.
Publications
- “Slaves and Semantics: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Wycherley’s The Country Wife”, Article for an essay collection entitled Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology, edited by Cassander L. Smith, Miles Parks Grier, and Nick Jones. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
- “Queer Economics/Queer Transformations: Race, Sexuality, and Social Change in Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me and Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams”, Article for an essay collection entitled Queer In Africa Reimagined, edited by Zethu Matebeni, Surya Monro, and Vasu Reddy. New York: Routledge, forthcoming.
- Diversity in Human Sexuality: Implications for Policy in Africa. Co-authored with H. Dugmore, J. Coovadia, G. Grey, C. Breyer et alia. Pretoria: Academy of Science of South Africa, 2015.
- Contested Intimacies: Sexuality, Gender, and the Law in Africa, including the introduction “Imagining Intersections: Sexuality, Gender, Law, and the Politics of Solidarities”, eds. Derrick Higginbotham and Victoria Collis-Buthelezi. Cape Town: Siber-Ink Press, 2015.
- “The Construction of a King: Waste, Effeminacy, and Queerness in Shakespeare’s Richard II” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 26 (2014): 59 – 73.
- “Cardenio’s Three Rs: Revision, Rape, and Rank in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s ‘Lost Play’”. Shakespeare in Southern Africa 25 (2013): 61 – 72.
- “Producing Women: Textile Manufacture and Economic Power on Late Medieval and Early Modern Stages.” Comitatus 41 (2010): 183 – 206.
- “Impersonators in the Market: Merchants and the Premodern Nation in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament.” Exemplaria 19.1 (Spring 2007): 163 – 182.
Areas of Interest
- Late Medieval and Early Modern Theatre
- Literary History, Genre, and Cultural Change
- Shakespeare and his contemporaries
- Queer theory/Gender Studies/Feminist Theory
- Marxism, Materialism, and the New Economic Criticism
- Queer African Literatures
Education
- Ph.D, Columbia University
- Certificate in Feminist Scholarship, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Columbia University
- M.A., Columbia University
- M.A., Simon Fraser University
Courses
Fall Semester 2017
- ENG-270: Lit History: Literature and the Question of Justice
- ENG-330: Medieval Literature