Catherine Reedy
Instructor of English
Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program
English
- 8477355267
- reedy@lakeforest.edu
Specialization
Shakespeare; Renaissance drama and poetry; sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious history; early modern medical practices and epidemic disease; revenge narratives.
Education
PhD, Harvard University, English
MA, Harvard University, English
BA, Bates College, Biological Psychology
Courses Taught
ENGL 211 From Fairylands to Flying Islands
ENGL 221 Literature and Medicine
ENGL 222 Plagues in Literature
ENGL 231 Revenge and Justice in Literature
ENGL/NEUR 232 Stories from the Spectrum
ENGL/NEUR 249 Brains, Minds, and Madness in Literature
Articles
“Contagious Fasts: Occasional Worship and Medical Practice in England and Massachusetts Bay Colony,” in Doctrine and Disease in the British and Spanish Colonial World, edited by Kathleen Miller. Penn State University Press, June 2025.
“Infected Fancies and Contagious Spectatorship in The Rape of Lucrece," in Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Grant Williams and Mark Kaethler. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, pp. 109-128.
“‘French Amulets,’ Expelling Poisons, and Contagion in The Changeling,” Early Modern Literary Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 2020, pp. 1-23.
Review of Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare in Bloomsbury. Shakespeare Quarterly, forthcoming.
“Public Fasts and Medical Practices: Special Worship and the Smallpox in Seventeenth Century Boston.” Forthcoming. Medicine and Religion in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1550 –1800 (ed. Kathleen Miller).
Editor: Thomas Middleton’s Lord Mayoral Show The Triumphs of Health and Prosperity for the Map of Early Modern London digital resource
“Shut In.” Flash Fiction. decomP magazinE (Fall 2017). Online.
“You Are What You Eat.” Fiction. Crack the Spine (24 May 2017). Online.
Contributor for Huffington Post (2015 –present). Online. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/katyree-366
Co-author of “Activation of raphe efferents to the medial prefrontal cortex by CRF; correlation with anxiety-like behavior.” (2008). Biological Psychology. 63(9): 832-9.
Awards and Honors
Krebs Humanities Scholarship, Lake Forest College (2025)
Faculty Inductee to Nu Rho Psi, National Honor Society for Neuroscience, Lake Forest College (2022)
John and Elizabeth Armstrong Dissertation Fellowship, Harvard University (2013-2014)
Winthrop Sargeant Prize Term-Time Fellowship, Harvard University (2012)
Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Harvard University (Spring 2011, Fall 2011)
Talks and Posters
“Rainbows, Plagues, and Providence: Middleton’s Final Lord Mayor’s Show.” Panel Participant, “Caroline Mayoral Shows: Middleton, Dekker, and Heywood’s Civic Entertainments,” Renaissance Society of America, Boston, MA, March 2025.
“The Pestilent Congregations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet." Panel Participant, “Shakespeare: Disease, Health, and the Human,” Midwest Modern Language Association, Chicago, IL, November 2024.
“Teaching Sexual Violence in Early Modern Literature." Workshop Panelist at Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, St. Louis, MO, November 2019.
“Shows of discontent”: The Aesthetics of Revenge in The Rape of Lucrece." Panel Participant, CLCS “Gendered Vengeance,” Modern Language Association, Chicago, IL, January 2019.
“Stamped Images: The Imagination and the Plague in Shakespeare’s Theater” (forthcoming)
Robert B. Glassman Symposium, Lake Forest College, November 2017
“Shows of discontent”: Female Lament and the Aesthetics of Revenge in The Rape of Lucrece
MLA panel session on “Gendered Vengeance”
January 2019