Blank, Paula

Paula Blank (M.A. Linguistics, Ph.D. English Language and Literature, Harvard University), teaches all things Shakespeare (and many things Renaissance, generally). She has published two books about Shakespeare, one about the Bard’s role in the rise of a national language (Broken English, Routledge, 1996), and another on Shakespeare and early modern science (Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Man, Cornell UP, 2006). Prof. Blank has also published scholarly articles on Renaissance poetry and poetics, the history of the English language, queer studies and the history of sexuality. These days she is trying to write about these topics for a general audience and has recently published in The Washington Post and theatlantic.com. Prof. Blank is also completing a new book, SHAKESPLISH: How We Read Shakespeare’s Language (Stanford UP, forthcoming 2016). SHAKESPLISH is about how modern American readers experience the poems and plays; it draws on her 22 years of student comments and questions, as well as insights from translation theory and performance studies (i.e., what actors and directors “do” with the language), to explore our encounters with Shakespeare’s beautiful, frustrating, unsettling, moving, challenging words. In her spare time, Prof. Blank is an amateur marionetteer, with more than 25 years of experience designing and building marionettes, mostly on classical and Renaissance themes.