Roya Biggie

Meet Professor Biggie

Years at Knox: 2018 to present

Education

Ph.D., English, 2017, CUNY Graduate Center
M.A., English, 2010, Georgetown University
B.A. English, 2008, St. Mary's College of Maryland

Selected Professional Accomplishments

Honors/Grants

• Francis Bacon Foundation Fellowship, Huntington Library, 2024
• American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Faculty Fellowship, 2023-2024
• Philip Green Wright-Lombard College Prize for Distinguished Teaching, Knox College,
  2023
• Short-term Fellowship, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2022
• Exceptional Achievement Award, Knox College, 2021
• ACM Mellon Faculty Career Enhancement Grant (collaborative grant), "Environment
  Education and the Liberal Arts: Bringing the Earth into Your Curriculum," 2019
• Mellon Faculty Fellow, Associated Colleges of the Midwest, 2018-2020
• Humanities Intensive Learning and Technology Scholarship (HILT), University of
  Pennsylvania, 2018
• National Endowment of the Humanities Institute Award, 2017
• Best Dissertation in Early Modern Studies, English Program, CUNY Graduate Center,
  2017
• Capelloni Dissertation Fellowship, CUNY Graduate Center, 2016

Publications

“Displacement’s Botanical Roots: The Rhetoric of Transplantation in Early Modern Thought.” English Literary Renaissance 54, no. 3, 2024.

Co-authored with Perry Guevara, “Shakespeare’s Mixed Stock: Biracial Affect in the Field.” Situating Shakespeare Pedagogy in US Higher Education, Edited by Marissa Greenberg and Elizabeth Williamson, Edinburgh UP, 2024.

"Mapping Race Digitally in the Classroom." Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide, Edited by Matthieu Chapman and Anna Wainwright, ACMRS Press, 2023.  

"Sycorax's Beetles: Legacies of Science, the Occult, and Blackness." Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance, Edited by Keith Botelho and Joseph Campana, Penn State UP, 2023. 

"The Botany of Colonization in John Fletcher's The Island Princess." Renaissance Drama, vol. 50, no. 2, 2022.

Review of Suparna Roychoudhury, Phantasmic Shakespeare: Imagination in the Age of Early Modern Science. Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, 2019.

"The Infectious, Alimentary, and Organistic Ecologies of John Ford's The Broken Heart." Early Modern Domestic Tragedy, special issue of The Early Modern Literary Sciences, vol.28, 2019.

"How to Do Things with Organs: Moving Parts in The Duchess of Malfi." Early Theatre vol. 21, no.2, 2018.

Invited Talks

"Race, Empire, and Plant Life on the Early Modern Stage," Van Burd Memorial Lecture, Distinguished Voices in Literature Lecture Series, SUNY Cortland, Cortland, NY (2019)

"The Botany of Colonization in John Fletcher's The Island Princess," Caxton Club, Knox College, Galesburg, IL (2019)

“Inter-Elemental Sympathies and Cross-Species Compassion: Caring for Hybrid Life in Titus Andronicus.” The Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance. New York, NY. October 2016.

Conference Participation

"Occult Cunning and Race in Antony and Cleopatra," Shakespeare Association of America Annual Conference, Minneapolis, MN (2023)

"Botanical Race-Making: The Rhetoric of Transplantation and Racial Mutability," Modern Language Association Annual Convention, San Francisco, CA (2023)

"Meteorological Grief in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy," Shakespeare Association of America Annual Conference, virtual conference (2021)

"Sympathetic Wombs and Elemental Vulnerability in King Lear," Shakespeare Association of America Annual Conference, work completed digitally (2020)

"Botanic Colonizers and European Strangers in John Fletcher's The Island Princess," Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Toronto, ON (2019)

Roundtable participant, "Storying Statements: Writing Research, Teaching, and Diversity Statements," MLA Annual Convention, Chicago, IL (2019)

“The Infectious, Alimentary, and Organistic Ecologies of John Ford’s The Broken Heart.” Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting. New Orleans, LA (2018)

Roundtable participant, “Teaching Race.” Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting. New Orleans, LA (2018)

"Treeless Forests and Feeling Trees," Shakespeare Association of America Annual Conference, Atlanta, GA (2017)

"The Pedagogical Potential of Beetles in Thomas Moffet's The Theater of Insects and Shakespeare's Cymbeline," Premodern Ecologies: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Human Interaction with the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO (2016)

"Caring for Hybrid Life in Titus Andronicus," The New Scholars Symposium: New Approaches to Early Modern Literature and Culture, Bates College, Lewiston, ME (2016)

"Elemental and Imaginative Sympathies in Titus Andronicus," Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Boston, MA (2016)

"'Accursed Complot to My Misery': Felt Sympathies and Antipathies in The Spanish Tragedy," Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Austin, TX (2016)