Lawrence Today magazine, Fall 2004
Gina Bloom, assistant professor of English, has been awarded a pair of
fellowships from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Huntington Library
in San Marino, Calif., in support of her research on 16th- and 17th-century
conceptions of the human voice and representations of boyhood.
Bloom is one of three recipients of a prestigious $40,000 Solmsen Fellowship
and is spending the 2004-05 academic year as a scholar-in-residence at the
UW-Madison’s Institute
for Research in the Humanities. She was selected from a pool of 21 international applicants for the fellowship,
which recognizes scholars who are working on literary and historical studies
of the European Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance periods.
"Professor Bloom’s appointment is a coup,” says David Sorkin,
director of the institute. “There were applications for this year’s
Solmsen Fellowship from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and
France.
The applicants are a ‘who’s who’ of younger scholars working
in the European tradition from antiquity to 1700.”
Bloom will spend her Solmsen residency conducting research for her book, Playing
Boys: Youth and Masculinity on the Early Modern Stage, in which she examines
representations of boyhood in 16th- and 17th-century dramas. She focuses especially
on boys at play and the way play was thought to prepare boys for adult manhood.
A $4,000 fellowship from the Huntington
Library, home to a collection of rare
books with an extensive concentration in the Renaissance, made possible Bloom’s
writing and research efforts this past summer to complete her first book, Choreographing
Voice: Agency and the Staging of Gender in Early Modern England.
Choreographing Voice examines how early modern writers, especially
dramatists like Shakespeare, understood the workings of the human voice — how
it was produced by speakers and heard by listeners. Focusing on the ways writers
represent the voice in stage plays, medical texts, song books, and religious
sermons, Bloom challenges perspectives on “voice” in modern feminist
thought, offering an alternative view of the relationship between gender,
speaking, and power.
A specialist in English Renaissance literature, especially drama, and gender
studies, Bloom joined the Lawrence English department faculty in 2001. She
earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan.
