Biography

I was born in Vancouver and raised in Toronto, where I attended the University of Toronto Schools. I received my BA in English and Religious Studies from the University of Toronto, MPhil in Medieval English Studies from Oxford University, and PhD in English from Stanford University.

My latest book is Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, recently published by Bloomsbury. I am also author of Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood (Palgrave, 2014), which was published in Palgrave’s Shakespeare Studies series, and The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2004), which won the Roland H. Bainton Prize for best book in literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.

In 2015, I edited a special issue of the award-winning online journal Borrowers and Lenders: the Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, on “Girls and Girlhood in Adaptations of Shakespeare,” and organized a colloquium on Anne Boleyn’s girlhood music book at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at the University of Toronto. 

I am co-editor, with Tom Bishop, of a special issue of Shakespearean International Yearbook entitled New Approaches to Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which is coming out later this year. I am also co-editor, with Richard Preiss, of Childhood, Education, and the Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2017); with Kaara Peterson, of The Afterlife of Ophelia (Palgrave, 2012); and, with Ananya Jahanara Kabir, of Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge, 2005).

I have published scholarly articles on a wide range of topics, including Anglo-French literary relations, Shakespeare adaptations, the history of feminist scholarship, medievalisms, and the reception of classical and medieval literature in the Renaissance.

In 2017 I was elected to the Royal Society of Canada, College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, and in 2018 I was awarded a Killam Research Fellowship from the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2019 I received the President’s Research Excellence Award from York University. 

I have currently been working on a series of podcasts, with John Edwards of the Musicians in Ordinary, featuring my work on girl performers, including a podcast of John Milton’s Comus.

Current projects include a collaborative project, with John Stone of the University of Barcelona, on Shakespeare and Diasporic Book History in Spain and Portugal, 1592-1820, funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, and a new edited collection, entitled Performing Girls and Women, Medieval to Early Modern and Beyond. Check out my new website devoted to Girls on Early English Stages: www.geesproject.com!