Faculty Profiles

Simone Waller is an early modernist specializing in English drama and prose. Her work centers on the intersection of literature and politics during the Reformation and is particularly attuned to historical questions of access to and involvement in public speech. Her current book project explores the proliferation of voices in sixteenth-century printed dialogues and performed drama, arguing that creative interactions between old and new means of communication in the press and theater established a mandate for political representation across the social spectrum. An article drawn from this project has been published in The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. New work under development focuses on the interplay between bodies, books, and the natural world as vehicles for communication in early drama. Simone received her PhD in 2019 from Northwestern University. At Reed, she teaches courses on Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists, as well as Humanities 110.