Simone Waller
Assistant Professor of English and Humanities
English Department
Division of Literature and Languages
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. A forthcoming article uses the insights of performance studies to reveal Reformation dialogues’ ability to frame reading and speaking about polemical works as performative signs of belonging to a political body intent on reform. Simone’s other interests include historiography and temporality in history plays and life writing, stagecraft in early interludes, and media studies. She received her PhD in 2019 from Northwestern University. At Reed, she teaches courses on Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists, as well as Humanities 110.