Katherine R. Larson

Biography

She is working as Associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is working as Associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Research Interest

Katherine Larson’s research and teaching centre on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and culture, with particular interests in early modern women’s writing, gender and language, rhetoric and embodiment, and music (especially opera and song). Her first monograph, Early Modern Women in Conversation (Palgrave, 2011; pbk. 2015), considers how gender shaped conversational interaction in England between 1590 and 1660. She has also co-edited two essay collections, Re-Reading Mary Wroth (Palgrave, 2015) and Gender and Song in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2014; rpt. Routledge, 2016), as well as special issues of Renaissance and Reformation and the University of Toronto Quarterly. Katherine’s articles have examined topics ranging from early modern games to the songs pervading Moulin Rouge. Her most recent book, Texts in and of the Air: The Matter of Song in Early Modern England, which features a companion recording, situates song as a multi-dimensional form that demands to be considered in embodied, gendered, and performance-based terms. She is currently collaborating with Scott Trudell (University of Maryland) and Sarah Williams (University of South Carolina) on the development of Early Modern Songscapes, an intermedia project that aims more fully to animate song’s least tangible, yet essential facets: its generic fluidity; its ability to register multiple meanings and permeate boundaries in unexpected ways; and its rootedness in the air. Katherine’s work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Connaught Foundation, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Bodleian Library, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Jackman Humanities Institute. She is also the recipient of a number of awards, including the 2008 John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature and a Rhodes Scholarship.