Rate My Professor Lindsay Kaplan

M. Lindsay Kaplan is a Professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University, where she has served on the faculty since 1993. She earned her B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and her Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. Kaplan teaches courses on medieval and early modern English literature and culture, with research and teaching specialties in pre-modern critical race studies, gender, Shakespeare, law, race, religious difference, and adaptation. Her scholarship examines the intersections of these themes in historical texts, contributing to understandings of how medieval Christian theological discourses constructed notions of racial inferiority, initially applied to Jews and later extended to Muslims and others. Kaplan's work traces continuities from medieval representations of Jews and Muslims as racialized enemies to early modern English drama.

Kaplan has received significant recognition for her research, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1999-2000 for her project 'Jews and Gender in Early Modern English Culture,' a Folger Shakespeare Library short-term fellowship, and various Georgetown University academic grants. Her key publications include The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1997), a contextual edition of The Merchant of Venice: Texts and Contexts (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002), Figuring Racism in Medieval Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2019), and The Merchant of Venice: The State of Play (Bloomsbury Arden, 2020). She has authored numerous essays, seven of which focus on The Merchant of Venice. Currently, she is completing Racializing Infidels: Medieval Continuities in Early Modern English Drama, which explores gendered infidel subordinates in relation to male Christian identity. Kaplan's contributions have influenced discussions on the historical development of racism and religious prejudice in literary studies.