Laurie Shannon
Associate Professor of English and the Wender Lewis Teaching and Research Professor
University Hall Room 214
Telephone: (847) 491-3643
Fax: (847) 467-1545
E-mail: l-shannon@northwestern.edu
Laurie Shannon (J.D., Harvard Law School, 1989, Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1996) specializes in English literature of the long sixteenth century, from the rise of the printed book in the late 1400s to the beheading of Charles I in 1649. She is author of Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago, 2002). Sovereign Amity concerns matters of agency, bureaucracy, gender, consent, and sexuality in early modernity's appropriation of classical friendship principles. It pursues a persistent opposition between the friendship pair (as a utopian experiment in micro-polity) and more systemic institutions like the body politic and monarchy, proposing an adversarial co-evolution for self-governing subjects and state-oriented authority.
Shannon's manuscript-in-progress extends these constitutionalist questions beyond the confines of a single species. It asks how animal variety and relations across species were understood before -- and against -- the Cartesian segregation of all non-human creatures within the homogenizing confines of the doctrine of the beast as machine. The Necessary Animal: Zootopian Politics in the Environs of Shakespeare (forthcoming from Chicago) thus takes up the role of animal variation to investigate the species concept in an era so often credited -- and discredited -- with an invention of the human. It delves into period ideas of animal participation in the histories of science, medicine, law, literature, theology, and philosophy (core modes of human knowledge and political imagination). Proposing the concept of animal sovereignty to name the kind of authority and entitlement persistently attributed to animals within a larger zootopian constitution, it outlines a vision of cosmopolity in which membership, agency, and participation were not confined by a (then emergent and now obsolete) human limit.
Shannon is also at work on Of English Dogges: Early Modern Canines in Print (an edition of John Caius' 1576 text, which was the first comprehensive encyclopedia of dog breeds printed in English) as well as a rangier -- and woolier -- manuscript on animal agency, entitled What the Tiger Meant and Other Tales of Animal Intention. Her essays have appeared in PMLA, American Literature, ELH, English Literary Renaissance, GLQ, Modern Philology, Renaissance Drama, SAQ, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Shakespeare Studies.
Shannon, who joined the Northwestern faculty in 2008, was awarded the Robert B. Cox Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award and The Dean's Award for Graduate Mentoring (both at Duke University) and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and (most recently) the Guggenheim Foundation.
Publications by Laurie Shannon
Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts. University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Articles
"Lear's Queer Cosmos," in Shakesqueer, ed. Madhavi Menon (forthcoming; Duke University Press, 2010).
"Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism, and the Natural History of King Lear," Shakespeare Quarterly, 60:2 (Summer, 2009), pp. 168-196.
"The Eight Animals in Shakespeare; or, Before the Human," PMLA, 124:2 (March, 2009), pp. 472-479.
"Minerva's Men: Horizontal Nationhood and Literary Production in Googe, Turberville, and Gascoigne," The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Literature, 1485-1603, eds. Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). pp. 437-454.
"The Touch of Office: Supernumary Erotic Economies and the Tudor Public Figure," in Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backwards Gaze, Vin Nardizzi and Stephen Guy-Bray, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), pp.135-148.
"Invisible Parts: Animals and the Renaissance Anatomies of Human Exceptionalism," in Animal Encounters, eds. Tom Tyler and Manuela Rossini (selected papers from the 4th Biannual European Conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, Amsterdam, June, 2006) (Brill Publishers, Leiden, NL, 2008), pp. 137-157.
"Poetic Companies: Musters of Agency in George Gascoigne's 'Friendly Verse'." GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 10.3 (Spring, 2004): 453-483.
"La chatte de Montaigne." Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne. ed. Philippe Desan, (trans. Marc Schachter). Paris: Editions Champion, 2004.
"Likenings: Rhetorical Husbandries and Portia's 'True Conceit' of Friendship." Renaissance Drama 31 (2002): 3-26.
"Nature's Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness." Modern Philology 98.2 (2000): 183-210.
"'His Apparel Was Done Upon Him': Rites of Personage in Foxe's Book of Martyrs." Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 193-98.
"'The Country of Our Friendship': Jewett's Intimiste Art." American Literature 71.2 (June 1999): 227-62.
"Monarchs, Minions, and 'Soveraigne' Friendship." Friendship special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 97.1 (Winter, 1998): 91-112.
"Emilia's Argument: Friendship and 'Human Title' in The Two Noble Kinsmen." ELH 64.3 (Sept. 1997): 657-82.
"The Tragedie of Mariam: Elizabeth Cary's Critique of Founding Social Discourses." English Literary Renaissance 24.1 (Winter, 1994): 135-53.
