Lori Haslem

Associate Dean of the College; Professor of English

Contact 309-341-7214 lhaslem@knox.edu

General Interests
"I have recently been exploring pamphlet accounts of victimized early modern English children and popular accounts of children witnessing major crimes in an effort to think through how certain Shakespeare plays could be historicized to better understand the role of the infants and children in them. My essay on this topic, "The Only Witness a Tongueless Child: Hearing and Reading the Silent Babes of Titus Andronicus and The Winter's Tale," takes up the particular problems of trauma and witness for the young children in these plays and considers also how early modern legal aspects must come into consideration when historicizing the role of the children Shakespeare portrays."

Years at Knox: 1996 to present

Education
Ph.D., English Language and Literature, 1990, University of Denver.
M.A., English Literature, 1986, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign.
B.A., English Literature, 1984, Purdue University.

Teaching Interests
Ways of reading, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Renaissance literature and culture, feminism in history, historical and cultural development of the fairy tale.

Selected Professional Accomplishments

Honors/Grants
Philip Green Wright-Lombard College Prize for Distinguished Teaching, 2001.

Publications
"Monstrous Issues: The Uterus as Riddle in Early Modem Medical Texts," forthcoming in The Female Body in Medicine and Literature. Ed. Andrew Mangham and Greta Depledge. Forthcoming with Liverpool University Press, November 2009.

Contributor. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales [Three Volumes]. Ed. Donald Haase. Greenwood Press, 2008. (Entries for Robert Bly; Fable; Gesta Romanorum; Andrew Lang; Puck,' Riddle,' Carl Sandburg)

Reviewer. Alexander, Catherine M. S., and Stanley Wells, Editors. Shakespeare and Sexuality. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge, UP, 2001. Renaissance Quarterly Summer 2003.

"Tragedy and the Female Body: A Materialist Approach to A Woman Killed with Kindness and The Duchess of Malfi." Approaches to Teaching Renaissance Drama, 2003.

"Black Devils, White Witches, and the Chains of Magic in Titus Andronicus and Othello." The Upstart Crow, 2002.

"Riddles, Female Space, and Closure in All's Well That Ends Well." English Language Notes, 2001.

"Is Teaching the Literature of Western Culture Inconsistent with Valuing Diversity?" Profession. Modern Language Association, 1998.

Presentations
"Monsters and Marvels: Strange Creatures of the Renaissance." Talk, one in a series of talks related to exhibit entitled, "Harry Potter's World: Renaissance Science, Magic, and Medicine," organized by the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Galesburg Public Library, Galesburg, Illinois, 2010.

"Imperilled Children in London Street Literature and in Shakespeare's Romances," The 17th annual Midwest Conference on Literature, Language, and Media, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, February 2008.

Campus & Community Involvement
Chair, Knox College Department of English.
Member, Modern Language Association.
Member, Renaissance Society of America.
Member, Phi Beta Kappa.

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What Students Say
"Lori is one of the few professors I know who could actually motivate me to attempt to READ, much less SPEAK, Middle English. Now every time I walk through a book store with a friend, I grab a copy of Chaucer, hold it aloft triumphantly and declare 'I read this! In Middle English no less!' Having taken so many classes with Lori already, I can easily say that she's one of the best professors I've had at Knox. When I was experiencing terrible writer's block, she was a great help in steering me in just the right direction. She helped me to focus many of my ideas and dealt with my occasional panic attacks when deadlines were looming."
-Jenni Wreyford, English literature major