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 (JD, Harvard Law School; PhD, University of Chicago) studies English literature and culture in the long sixteenth century. She has broad interests in the history of ideas in and through language, especially concerning the terms and conditions of embodiment; stakeholdership and the horizons of the political imagination; and the possibilities of the corporate form.

Shannon is the author of Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago, 2002), which concerns early modern appropriations of classical friendship. This tradition called the friend “another self” and two friends “one soul in two bodies.” Detailing the opposition between rules about agency and consent in the friendship pair (a utopian experiment in micro-polity) and precepts concerning disinterestedness and the public good in the bureaucratic institutions of the body politic and monarchy, the book describes an ethically adverse emergence for “liberal” subjects and state authority. Her second book pursues similar constitutional questions beyond the border of a single species. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (forthcoming from Chicago, 2012) asks how relations across species were understood before the Cartesian confinement of nonhumans within a privative, beast-machine doctrine and the modern nominalization “the animal” to which it gave rise. Exploring sixteenth-century readings of classical natural history and of the biblical narrative in Genesis, it traces attributions of stakeholdership, prerogative, perfection, rule, and entitlement to animals within a larger zootopian constitution. Despite a chorus of contrary claims (echoing from Aristotle to Hobbes to Agamben), early modern writers framed cross-species relations in a fundamentally political idiom. Montaigne describes humans and animals as “fellow-brethren and compeers”; Shakespeare contemplates the claims of Arden’s deer as “native burghers of this desert city.” This comparative political accommodation of animals also fuels a sharp zoographic critique of humankind: among creatures, man is not only “the most miserable and fraile” -- he plays the “tyrant,” too. Engaging early modern literature, theology, natural history, law, and anatomy, The Accommodated Animal documents a vision of cosmopolity in which stakeholdership was not confined to a human limit. It ends by analyzing the theatrics of seventeenth-century experimentation to suggest how this vision would be extinguished.

Shannon is now at work on Of English Dogges (an edition of John Caius’s 1576 text, the first comprehensive treatment of dogs printed in English). She also has a recurring weakness for the shaggy-dog story of early Elizabethan poet George Gascoigne and is developing a series of articles on this adaptable writer and occasional theorist. Her next project is tentatively entitled “Little Motes and Loud Weather” and will explore period speculations about infinitesimal phenomena (elements, specks, motes, atoms, and gnats) and how these minute bodies assemble to form much larger ones (from bodily illnesses to Shakespearean storms) -- all before the newfangled microscope began to disclose their secrets.

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). She is a former chair of the MLA Executive Committee of the Division on Shakespeare and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Publications by Laurie Shannon

Articles

"Greasy Citizens and Tallow-Catches: Early Modern Equivocations on Fuel" (forthcoming, PMLA)

"Lear's Queer Cosmos," in Shakesqueer: the Queer Companion to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 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.

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