Jennifer Higginbotham

Jennifer Higginbotham, new assistant professor in the Department of English, comes to us from the University of Pennsylvania, where she completed her Ph.D. on "Fair Maids and Golden Girls: Early Modern Girlhood and the Production of Femininity." The notion of girlhood is very much a cultural construct, and Higginbothams’ work traces the idea’s development in the Renaissance period. What a "girl" meant, in a time when both childhood and gender were being newly examined and identified, varies greatly from context to context: the book takes us through a series of linguistic, textual, and philosophical investigations to come to terms with this infinitely appropriable signifier. A practised teacher, Higginbotham teaches courses in Shakespeare and Women Renaissance Writers (Mary Wroth, Elizabeth I, Margaret Cavendish), to which students are already flocking.