Associate Professor, English
- PhD, University of Nebraska
- MA, University of Massachusetts
- ALB, Harvard University
Maura Giles-Watson (she/her) is an Associate Professor of English specializing in pre-modern drama and Performance Studies and in Classical Studies, especially poetry and drama. Maura teaches a range of courses that focus on Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s contemporaries, medieval and Renaissance drama and performance culture, Classical drama and reception (including Greek tragedy and Roman comedy), earlier Tudor literature and culture, pre-modern British and Irish literature, and linguistics. Maura’s teaching methods – best described by Frits van Oostrom’s concept of “teaching as conversation” – are based on the humanistic principles underpinning critical and feminist pedagogies that encourage students to think critically and resistantly through thought-provoking readings, project-based learning, and discussion-based classes that blend drama and ‘performative readings’ with elements of wider textual cultures, including social practices, economics, history, music, and visual art, and representations both of and by people who are marginalized or alienated.
Maura is on research leave for 2025-26 but she will be teaching one course: ‘Shakespeare: Live in London!’ for Study Abroad during January 2026 Intersession. During her leave, Maura is working on her next book project, ‘Choked by Foul Ambition’: Machiavels and their Mayhem in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, blends Machiavelli’s political theories with the post-modern ‘dark triad’ theory of personality to analyze ambition as a destructive force during early modernity – a period that witnessed the rise of individualism and the transformation of ambition from a Greco-Roman and Roman Catholic vice into a Puritan proto-capitalist virtue. Maura is also completing a new English translation Catullus’s poetry during her research leave, and, in grateful tribute to her late mentor, Mary C. E. Shaner, Maura is also editing and translating Prof. Shaner’s unpublished book manuscript, Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and the Medieval Commentaries on Ovid’s Heroïdes.
Scholarly Work
Oedipus Tyrannus, by Sophokles: A New Performance Translation (translator). Creative Commons 4.0 International License (copyright retained), 2024. [Translation commissioned for world-premiere performance by the Old Globe/USD Shiley Graduate Theatre Program in 2021.]
Ralph Roister Doister by Nicholas Udall. New edition and introduction in the Broadview Anthology of Tudor Drama. General ed. Alan Stewart. Broadview Press. 2021.
Ajax, by Sophokles: A New Performance Translation (translator). Creative Commons 4.0 International License (copyright retained), 2017. [Translation commissioned for world-premiere performance by the Old Globe/USD Shiley Graduate Theatre Program in 2017.]
“Tristis Orestes? The Ecstasy of Reception, Revenge, and Redemption in the Early Modern English Orestes Plays.” Chapter 3 in The Trojan Wars and the Making of the Modern World. Ed. Adam Goldwyn. Uppsala: Studia Graeca Upsalensia, 2015.
“Playing as Literate Practice: Humanism and the Exclusion of Women Performers from the London Professional Stages.” New Directions in Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices. Ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and John Thompson. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014.
“Odysseus and the Ram.” Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Bronzes at the Harvard Art Museums. Ed. Susanne Ebbinghaus. Harvard University Art Museum, 2014.
“John Rastell’s London Stage: Reconstructing Repertory and Collaborative Practice” Early Theatre 16.2 (2013), 171-85.
“The Singing ‘Vice’: Music and Mischief in Early English Drama.” Early Theatre 12.2 (2009), 57-90.
“Female Body as Geosomatic Apotrope in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Middleton.” Selected Papers from the Mapping the Premodern Conference. Ed. Karen Christiansen and Megan Moore. Chicago: Newberry Library, Center for Renaissance Studies, 2008.
“Odysseus and the Ram in Art and Context: Arthur M. Sackler Museum 1994.8 and the Hero’s Escape from Polyphemos.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 103 (2007), 555-77.
Areas of Interest
THEA 503 – Restoration Drama (MFA Program)
ENGL 497/CINT – Senior Project Seminar (with Advanced Integration)
LBST 495/CINT – Liberal Studies Senior Seminar (with Advanced Integration
ENGL 496 – Tudor Plays Project
ENGL 420 CADW – Advanced Studies in Shakespeare. Topics vary and have included Shakespeare and Race; Shakespeare’s Women; Shakespeare and Gender; Shakespeare and Music; Shakespeare and Religion; and Contemporary Global Shakespeares; Shakespeare and Italy.
ENGL 420 CADW/240 ELTI – Shakespeare in London
ENGL 410 (Advanced Writing in the Major) – Shakespeare and Race
ENGL 377 – Development of the English Language
ENGL 364D – Racism and Colonialism in Early Modern English Texts and Culture
ENGL 335/ELTI – Subversive Laughter: Roman and Renaissance Comedy
ENGL 335/ELTI – Tudor Drama and Performance Culture
ENGL 321 – ‘Whom Gods Destroy’: Myth, Ritual, and Performance in Greek Tragedy
ENGL 326 – The Thomas More Circle
ENGL 319/335 – Shakespeare’s Frenemies
ENGL 300 – Survey of Early British and Irish Literature
ENGL 260 – Critical Reading: Ambiguity
ENGL 240 Honors – Shakespeare and Love
ENGL 240 ELTI – Shakespeare
ENGL/FYW 150 – Three Difficult Conversations: Immigration; Indigenous People’s Rights; Reparations for Slavery
ENGL/FYW 150 – Protest Songs of the Americas: Social Justice Poetry and its Music
Office Hours
| Section 06 | |||
| 2/12 - 5/07 | T | 11:30 am - 1:30 pm | FH 175B |