Derrick Higginbotham

Contact:
deh2@hawaii.edu

I am an Associate Professor whose primary teaching and research interests are late medieval and early modern English literary cultures, queer theory/trans studies, as well as economic/Marxist criticism and Ecocriticism. I am especially interested in interrelations between literature, sexuality, and economics, both in the past and present. My book, Insatiable! Gender, Sexuality, and Makeshift Capitalism, ca. 1350 - ca 1650 is under advance contract with the University of Toronto Press.  It examines representations of men in the service sector, whether as consumers, retailers, or financiers, demonstrating the ways that the lust for sex converges with the lust for wealth, which can queer sexuality and trans masculinity. 

I also am the co-editor, with Assistant Professor Nicholas R. Jones, Yale University, of the book series at Routledge entitled Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities that seeks to link the analytics of critical theory and cultural studies to the early modern period in various geographic locations from 1400 to 1700 (see https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Critical-Junctures-in-Global-Early-Modernities/book-series/RCJG ). 

Publications


  • “Desert: The Place of the Desert in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.” In Logomotives: Words that Changed the Premodern World, edited by Marjorie Rubright and Stephen Spiess. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2025.

  • “Filiation and White Freedom: Class, Race, and Sexuality in Brome’s A Jovial Crew.” Class Intersectionalities, Ronda Arab and Laurie Ellinghausen, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

  • “Feeling in Justice: Racecraft and The Merchant of Venice.” In Global Shakespeare and Social    Injustice: Towards a Transformative Encounter, edited by Sandra Young and Christopher  Thurman. London: Bloomsbury, 2023.

  • “Queer States:  Beyond the Nomos of the Closet in Tendai Huchu’s The Hairdresser of Harare.” In Spatial Justice in the Postcolony, edited by Jaco Barnard-Naudé and Julia Cryssostalis. New York: Routledge, 2020 (forthcoming).
  • “Women/Animals/Slaves: Race and Sexuality in Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675).” In Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology, edited by Cassander L. Smith, Nicholas Jones, and Miles P. Grier.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018: 38 - 66.
  • “Beyond Identity: Queer Affiliation and the Politics of Solidarity in Gordimer’s None to  Accompany Me and Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams.” In Queer in Africa: LGBTQI Identities, Citizenship, and Activism, edited by Zethu Matebeni, Surya Monro, and Vasu Reddy. London: Routledge, 2018: 84 – 98
  • 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
  • Shakespeare and his contemporaries
  • Queer theory/Trans Studies/Feminist Theory
  • Marxism, Materialism, and the New Economic Criticism
  • Ecocriticism
  • Queer African Literatures

Awards


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


Spring Semester 2026
  • ENG-272: Introduction to Literature: Culture & Literature: Queer Pasts, Queer Presents
  • ENG-331: Renaissance British Literature
  • ENG-388: Literature and the Environment
Spring Semester 2025
  • ENG-745: Seminar in Shakespeare: Early Modern Ecologies
Fall Semester 2024
  • ENG-330: Medieval Literature
Spring Semester 2024
  • ENG-745: Seminar in Shakespeare: Rogues, Pirates, and Boys: Queer/Trans Theories and Early Modern Culture