Areas of Interest: Shakespeare, Drama, the Bible as Literature, and Jewish American Literature
Contact Information
Email: mosherow@umbc.edu
Office: PAHB 302
Office Number: 410-455-8639
Education
Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park
M.A., University of Maryland, College Park
B.A., Carnegie Mellon University
Biography
Michele Osherow is an Associate Professor of English and affiliate faculty member/former director of UMBC’s Judaic Studies Program. Her areas of specialization include Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, the Bible as literature, early modern women’s writing, Jewish American Literature, Dramatic Literature, and Performance Studies.
Dr. Osherow has extensive experience in professional theatre and served for seventeen years as the Resident Dramaturg for the award-winning Folger Theatre in Washington D.C. where she contributed to nearly 50 productions, and where she continues to consult. She received a best actress nomination from D.C. Theatre Scene for her work in Brian Friel’s Afterplay (Quotidian Theatre) and has been seen onstage at the Folger Theatre, The Kennedy Center, Theatre J and other professional area theatres. With mathematician Manil Suri, she co-authored the play The Mathematics of Being Human which has been performed at the National Museum of Mathematics in New York City and elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad.
Her publications include several articles on Shakespeare, the Bible, and early modern women, including “Mary Sidney’s Embroidered Psalms” in Renaissance Studies (UK); “A pattern to the rest”: More on the Convergence of Text and Textile in Mary Sidney’s Psalms” in The Sidney Journal; “At my petition: Embroidering Esther” in the Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing; “She is in the right: Biblical Maternity in All’s Well that Ends Well” in Routledge’s Accents on Shakespeare Series, “‘Give ear o’ princes’: Deborah, Elizabeth, and the Right Word,” in Explorations in Renaissance Culture and more. Her book Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern England was released by Ashgate Publishing Company in 2009. Her current book project attends to the relationship between early modern women’s texts and textiles, examining seventeenth-century women’s needlework as a form of biblical commentary.
At UMBC Dr. Osherow has enjoyed collaborating with faculty in the departments of Theatre, Mathematics, Visual Arts, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Imaging Research Center. Her research has been supported by an Alice B. Geyer Fellowship, the Alex E. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship, UMBC Summer Faculty Fellowships, a Dresher Center Summer Faculty Fellowship, and a research fellowship from CAHSS. She has been invited to speak in the U.S. and abroad on Shakespeare performance and adaptation, women’s texts and textiles, and the early modern Bible and its readers. In addition, she has served several times as Interim Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America, the world’s largest organization of Shakespeare scholars.
Books
Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern England
Ashgate, 2009
Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern England documents the extent to which portrayals of women writers, rulers, and leaders in the Hebrew Bible scripted the lives of women in early modern England. Attending to a broad range of writing by Protestant men and women, the author investigates how the cultural requirement for feminine silence informs early modern readings of biblical women’s stories.