Rate My Professor Martine van Elk

Martine van Elk is a Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. She holds MAs from the University of Amsterdam and Rice University and a PhD from Rice University, with her doctoral research focusing on Shakespeare, constructions of femininity, and identification. A Dutch native, her expertise spans early modern literature in the field of Literature, including Shakespeare, early modern drama, early modern vagrants, 17th-century women writers from England and the Netherlands, book history, material culture, domesticity, privacy, and the public sphere. She examines relationships between texts and objects created by early modern women, advocating comparative and interdisciplinary approaches. Current research interests include 17th-century women on and behind the stage in England, France, and the Low Countries, and early modern women as makers of domestic artifacts. She runs a blog titled Early Modern Women: Lives, Texts, Objects, and serves as participating faculty in the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Professor van Elk teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, Milton, English drama, and Irish literature. Key publications include her monograph Early Modern Women’s Writing: Domesticity, Privacy, and the Public Sphere in England and the Dutch Republic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), co-edited volume Tudor Drama Before Shakespeare (Palgrave, 2004), and essays on Shakespeare, vagrancy, and early modern women. In 2025, she published “Politics, Authorship, and Philosophy: Teaching Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World in the Diverse Graduate Classroom” in ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830. She is an editor of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal.