Virginia Mason Vaughan |
Virginia Vaughan is department chair and professor of English at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
She has been teaching and writing about Shakespeare for more than 30 years. Although much of her early work was on Shakespeare’s history plays, in the 1990s her research began to focus on the formation of racial attitudes during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Her book Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800, was published in 2005.
She and her husband, Alden T. Vaughan, co-wrote the book Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (1991) and jointly edited an important edition of The Tempest for the Arden Shakespeare edition (1999).
The Vaughns were co-curators of the 1992 NEH-supported Folger exhibition A New World of Wonders, for which they also lectured on The Tempest and the New World in conjunction with a staged reading from the play. In 2007, they co-curated the Shakespeare in American Life exhibition at Folger Shakespeare Library and compiled and edited the exhibition catalog.
Vaughan holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
