Shakespeare’s Politics of Edibility: White English Femininity and Titus Andronicus

Title: Shakespeare’s Politics of Edibility: White English Femininity and Titus Andronicus

By Sarah-Gray Lesley (University of Chicago, English Department)

Date: Tuesday, March 3, 2026

Time: 1730-1900

Room: Humanities Seminar Room (H-232)

Abstract: Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England’s increased investments in global capitalism, colonialism, and the transatlantic slave trade came about in dialectical relation to nascent theories of English whiteness. This talk considers how the particular category of English white womanhood developed, in part, through the early modern playhouse. Theater practitioners workshopped the idea that white women were the primary buyers and arbiters of the nation’s budding taste for international goods due to their status as the privileged bearers of white English children. Taking William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1590) as its central case study, this talk explores how staged representations of reproduction and consumption shaped interlocking fictions about gender, race, and nation through the iconic white woman.

About the speaker: tbd

Organized by the Department of English Language and Literature