Sarah-Gray Lesley | Department of English Language and Literature

Teaching Fellow

Cohort Year: 2018

Research Interests: Early Modern British Literature; Critical Race Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies; History of Reproductive Labor; Food Studies

Biography

My dissertation contributes to the growing field of critical whiteness studies by arguing that the cultural construction we know as white womanhood emerged, in part, through representational strategies developed in early modern English literature. My project reads texts such as Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko alongside histories of England’s increasing involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, global capitalism, and colonialism. My project shows how these socio-economic shifts gave rise to the nascent racial logic of white femininity through tropes about sexual reproduction and commodity consumption. My article on Thomas Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside is drawn from my dissertation and is forthcoming with Renaissance Drama.

In addition to my research, I have worked extensively with the digital humanities project, Beshrew Me!, led by Dr. Ellen MacKay. Beshrew Me! reimagines the early modern digital variorum through Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. I have also served as the graduate coordinator and lecturer for the University of Chicago’s study abroad program in London. I received the Dean’s Award for Graduate Student Teaching Excellence in 2022.

Publications

“‘The Mother’s Mouth’: Markets, Birthing Rooms, and White Women in Thomas Middleton’s London, 1613,” Renaissance Drama 52.1. (Forthcoming, June 2024)

Contributor to Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix, eds. Noémie Ndiaye and Lia Markey (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS Press, 2023). Print and Open Access.

Entry #30: “Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688) by Aphra Behn” (247 words), 193-4.
Entry #31: “Oroonoko: a tragedy (1696) by Thomas Southerne” (242 words), 194.

“The Epicure in Surinam: Lucretian Reception and Skepticism in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.” Restoration Studies in English Literary Culture, 1600-1700 43.2 (January 2020): 75-91.

Recent Courses

Fall 2022: Instructor of Record, The “Bad Moms” Renaissance

Fall 2021: Instructor of Record, The Stage and the City: Performance and Daily Life in Renaissance London

Recent Courses

ENGL 10402 Reading the Rom-Com: Renaissance and Modern

Crosslistings

GNSE 12135.

This course challenges the common assumption that modern romantic comedies are not worthy of academic study by examining early modern iterations of the genre--from William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew (1590) to Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677). In turning to these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, we will consider how this often trivialized genre encodes, theorizes, and problematizes issues of gender, sex, class, race, and desire through its familiar formula of "simply" getting some people to fall in love. (Drama, Pre-1650)

Sarah-Gray Lesley

2025-2026 Autumn

Drama

Medieval/Early Modern

ENGL 10422 Body Problems: Theorizing Fat and Thin in Early Modern Literature

Whether in the doctor’s office or in our TikTok algorithm, messages about body weight, size, and shape are ubiquitous in our current moment. This class tracks the history of this phenomenon through early modern English literary representations of fatness, thinness, and everything in between. Thinking with critical race, trans, and queer theory, we will read widely from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales through William Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor to Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World to unpack how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England theorized fatness and thinness through and with theories of race, gender, sexuality, and class. (Pre-1650, Medieval/Early Modern)

Sarah-Gray Lesley

2025-2026 Winter

Medieval/Early Modern

Pre-1650