Faculty & Staff
Peter Erickson received his B.A., magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Amherst College; spent a graduate year on fellowship at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in England; and completed his Ph.D. at the University of California at Santa Cruz. One of the founders of feminist Shakespeare criticism in the early 1980s, Erickson is currently part of a group of scholars working to establish the study of race, including racial whiteness, in the field of Renaissance culture. His wider interests are both cross-disciplinary—with dual commitments to literature and visual art—and cross-historical—with strong investments in contemporary culture, as well as the Renaissance. Erickson is the author of Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama (1985), Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (1991), and Citing Shakespeare: The Reinterpretation of Race in Contemporary Literature and Art (2007). He has co-edited three volumes: Shakespeare’s “Rough Magic” (1985), Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (2000), and Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello (2005).