Profile

Madhavi Menon

Associate Professor
Literature

  • Additional Positions at AU

    Director of the MA Programme in Literature
  • Madhavi Menon is interested in desire. She is the author of Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (University of Toronto Press, 2004), which explores how Renaissance rhetoric manuals encounter and present desire; and of Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film (Palgrave, 2008), a polemical inquiry into the methodologies within which we study desire. She is also the editor of Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Duke UP, 2010), which is the first book to put queer theory in conversation with every one of Shakespeare's poems and plays.

    In addition to irregularly teaching a class called Shakesqueer, Professor Menon also teaches classes on queer theory, literary theory, Renaissance literature, and drama.

  • Degrees

    PhD, English, Tufts University. MA, English, University of Delhi. BA, English with Honours, St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi

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  • CAS - Literature
  • Battelle Tompkins - 220

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Teaching

  • Fall 2009

Scholarly, Creative & Professional Activities

Selected Publications

 

Shakesqueer: The Queer Companion to The Complete Works of Shakespeare (forthcoming from Duke University Press, 2010)

 

Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

 

Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004)

           

“Coriolanus and I,” in E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tukhanen (ed.), Queer Times, Queer Becomings (forthcoming)

 

“Period Cramps,” in Stephen Guy-Bray, Vin Nardizzi, and Will Stockton (eds.), Backward Gaze: Essays in Queer Renaissance Historiography (forthcoming)

 

“Working Notes: An Interview with Farhan Akhtar,” South Asian Popular Culture 5.1 (April 2007): 77-85

 

“Queering History,” co-authored with Jonathan Goldberg, PMLA 120.5 (October 2005): 1608-17

 

“Spurning Teleology in Venus and Adonis,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.4 (2005): 491-519

 

“Richard II and the Taint of Metonymy,” ELH 70.3 (2003): 653-75

 

 

Work In Progress

Queer Universalism: Shakespeare and Indifference

 

This monograph organises itself around Alain Badiou’s suggestion that in the face of increasing claims of identitarian specificity, one might consider the politics and ethics of being “indifferent to difference.” Following up on the ideas of sameness and difference that animated my last book, I think about what it might mean, methodologically, to be indifferent to differences of chronology, culture, and sexuality. By routing such an inquiry through a study of Shakespearean texts, I grapple also with the paradox involved in studying a specific author to suggest an indifference to specificity. Shakespeare provides the occasion for this book to think through, and put pressure on, a variety of present-day categories of sexual identity – lipstick lesbians, rice queens, and fag-hags, among others. It suggests that the desires at play in these categories exceed identitarian containment, which is what prompts our attempt to contain them in the first place. Far from being inventions of the modern era, however, these desires suggest an indifference to chronology that complicates our assumptions about time, periodization, desire, and identity.

 

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