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Professor Valerie Traub
Professor of English, University of Michigan

Faculty Recognition Citation

Working at the intersection between literature and the history of sexuality in the early modern period, Valerie Traub is the foremost voice in lesbian studies of early modernity and a top scholar working on sexual representation in any period. She revolutionized the way scholars think and write about female-female eroticism in Shakespearean drama.

Professor Traub’s publications on sexuality and early modern anatomies are foundation texts. She is the author of Desire & Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama and a co-author of Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects. Her forthcoming book, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, demonstrates the ways in which female same-sex desires accrue significance in the Renaissance. In addition to publishing in Shakespeare Quarterly and Shakespeare Studies, the most significant journals in her field, she is the North American associate editor of Textual Practice and a member of the Shakespeare Quarterly board.

Her work has earned extraordinary recognition, both in the United States and in Europe, including Newberry Library and Folger Library fellowships. She is much sought after as a speaker at professional meetings, and in demand as a manuscript reader for major scholarly presses and as a grant reviewer for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MacArthur Foundation and the Newberry Library.

Professor Traub, who holds a joint appointment in English and women’s studies, joined the University faculty in 1996. With care and enormous energy, she has chaired graduate studies in the Department of English for two years. She also has served on the department’s executive committee. From 1997 to 1999, she helped steer the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Group, an interdisciplinary intellectual community of faculty and graduate students that has sponsored speakers and activities of wide interest across the University. She helped organize an international conference on “The Rituals and Rhetorics of (Un-) Veiling” and co-directed the successful National Endowment for the Humanities seminar for college teachers “Renaissance Bodies: English Literature and Medicine.”

Professor Traub, who consistently receives excellent ratings as a teacher, is especially effective with graduate students, who find in her an engaged and passionate scholar crossing disciplinary boundaries in an exemplary fashion. The winner of a Center for Research on Learning and Teaching Award in 1999, she has become an intellectual force in the women’s studies’ doctoral program.

For Professor Traub’s scholarly contributions to literature and the history of sexuality, her interdisciplinary work on early modern studies, and her dedicated service and inspiring teaching, the University of Michigan proudly presents to Valerie Traub its Faculty Recognition Award.

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