I am an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. My work is largely interested in understanding how the intersections of religion and horror are shaped by cultural discourses surrounding gender, race, and sexuality. My current book project, entitled The Spirit of the Nation: Fantasies of Christian Conversion and White Femininity, 1500-1660, explores the cultural fantasies – created through a vast intersecting network of pamphlets, treatises, manuals, ballads, sermons, poems, prose fiction, medical books, and especially public theatre – that created a composite image of the conversional potential of the early modern white English woman.
Outside of this book project, much of my research centers on how studying how the literatures of the early modern witch-craze played a key role in the development of a Protestant English national identity following the Reformation. I center the witch trials as an early articulation of white supremacist logic and race-making. My work on this topic has been published in Shakespeare Studies and the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.
My research interests include early modern literature and drama, representations of women, women writers, gender, sexuality and desire, race, religion and conversion, horror, diabolism, magic, and the supernatural. I teach courses on Shakespeare and other pre-1700 English and world literature, monsters & monstrosity, horror, sex & the erotic, the romance novel, mythology, and sci-fi and fantasy.
In my spare time, I am an avid romance novel reader, dungeons and dragons player, very amateur video game player, and enthusiastic dog-watcher.
You can contact me at:
Email: korellh@uwplatt.edu
Hannah Korell 