Adele Davidson is the first alumna of Kenyon to receive tenure in the English department. She has taught at Kenyon since 1985, after receiving her doctorate from the University of Virginia and having taught at Bowdoin College. Her main field of specialization is Shakespeare, and her teaching interests include Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and poetry, comedy, and the literature of the Reformation. She has directed the honors program four times, and twice served as Resident Director of the department's off-campus study program at the University of Exeter. Her collegiate service at Kenyon has included terms as Faculty Secretary, chair of Faculty Lectureships, Humanities Representative on the Faculty Executive Committee, chair of the Resource Allocation Committee, and membership on the Campaign Planning Committee (for the campaign concluded in 2001), where she chaired the Subcommittee on Quality of Student Life. A summer grant from the American Council of Learned Societies has supported research at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where she also led an Evening Colloquium on Elizabethan shorthand.

Professor Davidson's book, Shakespeare in Shorthand: The Textual Mystery of King Lear, won the 2007 Jay L. Halio Prize in Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies from the University of Delaware Press. Professor Davidson's research interests include textual studies and bibliography, and she has explored the question of whether or not some of Shakespeare's early quartos may have been transcribed in Elizabethan stenography, a textual issue that potentially affects the shape, wording, and content of the plays. Her book examines Elizabethan shorthand in relation to the quarto (1608) and folio (1623) versions of King Lear. In 2005 her discovery of acrostics and anagrams in the seventeenth-century poetry of George Herbert was written up in the arts section of The London Times, and she is currently writing a book on Herbert's poetry.

Education

Ph.D. University of Virginia
M.A. University of Virginia
A.B. Kenyon College

Selected Publications

"'Common Variants' and 'Unusual Features': Shorthand and the Copy for the First Quarto of Lear," The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 105:3 (forthcoming fall, 2011).

""Two worlds become much like each other": Poetic Co-inherence in Little Gidding and The Temple", in George Herbert's Travels, ed. Christopher Hodgkins (University of Delaware Press, forthcoming fall, 2011).

"The Temple's Left Column: George Herbert in Acrostick Land," Times Literary Supplement, December 9, 2005.

"King Lear in an Age of Stenographical Reproduction," The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 92.3 (October 1998): 297-324.

"'Some by Stenography'? Stationers, Shorthand, and the Early Shakespearean Quartos," The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 90.4 (December 1996): 417-449.

"Shakespeare and Stenography Reconsidered," Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, n.s., 6 (1992), 77-100.

Courses Taught

ENGL 103/104: The Writer in the Text
ENGL 216: The Theory of Comedy
ENGL 220, 320, 420: Shakespeare
ENGL 231: The Elizabethan Age
ENGL 331: The Literature of Reformation: Dogma and Dissent