Rate My Professor Karen Britland

Karen Britland is the Halls-Bascom Professor of Early Modern Literature in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also serves as Professor in Religious Studies, Chair of Integrated Liberal Studies, and open-topic Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities for 2024-2028. Prior to joining UW-Madison in 2008, she was a faculty member in the English Department at Keele University and worked between 2000 and 2012 as a research associate and then associate editor on the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. Britland holds a B.A. from the University of Oxford, where she earned a half-blue in Women’s Lightweight Rowing, an M.A. from the University of Reading supervised by Diane Purkiss, and a Ph.D. from the University of Leeds with Martin Butler, funded by an AHRC grant and supported by a Leverhulme Trust fellowship.

Her research specializes in Shakespeare, early modern drama and performance, print and manuscript culture, women’s writing, the English Revolution, Anglo-Continental exchanges, early modern women’s religious writing, magic, alchemy, and clandestine techniques such as ciphers and invisible inks. Key publications include her monograph Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge University Press, 2006; paperback 2009) and Women Writing in a Time of War, 1642-1689 (Oxford University Press, 2025). She has edited John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (Bloomsbury, 2021), John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (Bloomsbury, 2018), Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (A&C Black, 2010), and co-edited Henry V (Bloomsbury, 2019). As general editor of the Revels Plays series, she is preparing Shakespeare’s Richard II for the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series (forthcoming 2027). Her articles have appeared in The Seventeenth Century, Review of English Studies, and Huntington Library Quarterly, addressing figures like Aphra Behn and Hester Pulter, and topics such as royalist encryption. Britland teaches large Shakespeare lectures and graduate seminars on city comedy, Shakespeare on film, and revolutionary women’s writing. In 2015, she received UW-Madison’s Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award.