Emily Weissbourd received her Ph.D. in 2011 from the program in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to coming to Lehigh, she held an Ahmanson-Getty postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA, a critical writing teaching fellowship at University of Pennsylvania, and a visiting assistant professorship at Bryn Mawr College. She specializes in early modern English and Spanish literatures, with research and teaching interests in early modern representations of race, religion, gender and sexuality; Tudor and Stuart drama and the Spanish comedia; transnational studies and translation; and Shakespearean afterlives in popular culture.
Her first monograph, Bad Blood: Staging Race Between Early Modern England and Spain, was published in 2023 in the RaceB4Race series at the University of Pennsylvania Press. She is also the co-editor (with Barbara Fuchs) of the edited collection Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean and has published articles in a number of academic journals and edited collections. You can find her public-facing writing on slavery in early modern England on the BBC’s History Extra website, and on Othello and reality television on The Rambling.