Vanessa I. Corredera

Title: Department Chair, Professor
Office Location: Nethery Hall 120
E-mail: correder@andrews.edu
Phone: (269) 471-3073

Education

BA: Andrews University

PhD: Northwestern University

Biography

After graduating from Andrews University with a B.A. in English and minor in history in 2006, I had the pleasure to return as a professor in 2013 after graduating from Northwestern University with an emphasis in Renaissance literature (2012). My research focuses on the intersection of Shakespeare and race, particularly in contemporary performance and popular culture, but also in early modern literature more broadly. This interests in race and representation manifests across my classes, whether the first-year introductory course, Approaches to English Studies, or in upper-division classes, such as Shakespeare, Race, and Adaptation. I also lend my enthusiasm and expertise to the foundational first-year Honors course, Western Heritage, where I teach the fine arts portions of this interdisciplinary class that looks at diverse voices and philosophical paradigms influential to the Western intellectual and cultural tradition.

I am currently the Chair of the Department of English, and I also serve on the Faculty Senate, Honors Council, and the Institutional Diversity and Inclusion Action Council. Across these various roles, I strive to foster the mentorship and collegial atmosphere so crucial to my own personal and intellectual growth while a student at Andrews. I am also honored to serve my profession as an editor of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, as an Ethnicity and Race in the Profession Delegate for the Modern Language Association, and as a trustee for the Shakespeare Association of America.

Current Research or Professional Activities

Monograph:

Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Edited Collection:

Co-Editor, with Geoffrey Way and L. Monique Pittman. Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation. Routledge, April 2023.

Select Peer-Reviewed Articles and Chapters:

“When the Master’s Tools Fail: Racial Euphemism in Shakespeare Appropriation, or, the Activist Value of Premodern Critical Race Studies.” Literature Compass. Special Issue: RaceBeforeRace Appropriations, vol. 20, no. 7-9, 2023, pp, 2-13.

"Decommissioning the Bard: Chloe Gong's These Violent Delights as Anticolonial Edutainment." Comparative Drama. Shakespeare and Fiction Special Issue, vol. 57, no. 1-2, 2023, pp. 29-56

“Lessons for Whiteness: Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor.” Shakespeare, vol. 17, no. 1, 2021, pp. 54-57.

Co-authored with L. Monique Pittman, Karl Bailey, and Kristen Denslow. “‘Were I human’: Beingness and the Postcolonial Object in Westworld’s Appropriation of The Tempest.” Variable Objects. Edited by Louise Geddes and Valerie Fazel. Edinburgh UP, 2021. pp. 85-107.

“Get Out and the Remediation of Othello's Sunken Place: Beholding White Supremacy's Coagula.” Borrowers and Lenders 8.1 (2020): n.p.

“‘How dey goin to kill Othello’: Key & Peele, Race, and Shakespearean Universality.” Journal of American Studies vol. 54 no. 1, 2020, pp. 27-35.

“The Moor Makes a Cameo: Serial, Shakespeare, and the White Racial Frame.” The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Mariam Jacobson. Routledge, 2019. pp. 359- 369.

“Far More Black than Black: Stereotypes, Masculinity, and Americanization in Tim Blake Nelson’s O.” Literature/Film Quarterly vol. 45 no. 2, 2017, n.p.

“‘Not a Moor Exactly’: Shakespeare, Serial, and Modern Constructions of Race.” Shakespeare Quarterly vol. 67 no. 1 , 2016, pp. 30-50.

Monographs in Progress:

I am currently working on two monographs. The first, entitled Shakespeare and Citational Representation, examines the way television shows and films purposely employ dialogue, plotlines, and characters from Shakespeare's plays in order to authorize particular gendered and racialized constructions on identity. The second book-lengthh project, Staging Liberation: Strategies of Anti-Deomination in Shakespearean Performance, turns to stage adaptations of Shakespeare in order to explore affects, and aesthetics, and representational strategies they employ to contest forms of sexual, racial, and gender domination.

Awards:

2023: Folger Shakespeare Library Virtual Fellowship
2021: Daniel S. Augsburger Excellence in Teaching Award
2020-2021: Andrews University Faculty Teaching Fellow
2018: Undergraduate Research Mentor Award
2018-2021 Research Faculty
2016-2022: Faculty Research Grant