Denise Albanese

George Mason University, Cultural Studies Program, Program Director

George Mason University, English, Faculty Member

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Denise Albanese is Director of the Cultural Studies Ph.D. Program and Professor of English and Cultural Studies at George Mason University. She received her Ph.D. in Renaissance literature from Stanford University and a B.A. (with a double major in physics and English) from New York University. Albanese has also had a visiting appointment at Johns Hopkins University, a Mellon post-doctoral Fellowship at Wesleyan University's Center for the Humanities, and short-term research fellowships from the Huntington and Folger libraries. During Spring 2014 she taught the introductory graduate course "A Folger Introduction to Research Methods and Agendas" at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.

She is author of Extramural Shakespeare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and New Science New World (Duke University Press, 1996); additionally, she has published on Tudor-Stuart mathematics; Shakespeare in performance; and the place of literature in cultural studies. Connecting affect to cultural politics is a research recent interest: she has a book chapter ,"Feeling Shakespeare," in a forthcoming Oxford UP collection on Shakespeare, feminism, and embodiment, edited by Valerie Traub.

Albanese regularly teaches courses in critical and literary theory; mass culture; affect and politics; the cultural study of science and technology; and Shakespeare, Milton, and other early modern writing;

Currently she has begun on a new project examining the Santa Fe Institute's role as epistemological agent in American neoliberal economics. Additionally, she is continuing her research into Shakespeare as a public object, focused on discourses of performance and affect.

Selected recent publications:

“The Literary: Cultural Capital and the Specter of Elitism”
The Renewal of Cultural Studies, ed. Paul Smith (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011)

“Canons Before Canons: College Entrance Requirements and the Making of a National-Educational Shakespeare”
Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance, eds. Mimi Godfrey, Coppelia Kahn, and Heather Nathans (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011) 157-174.

“Francis Bacon’s Plaque on the Reader’s Walk, New York City” (Editor’s Column)
PMLA 126. No. 1 (January 2011) 13-14

“School for Scandal?: New Media Hamlet, Olivier, and Camp Connoisseurship”
Renaissance Drama Volume 34 (2005) Special Issue: "Media, Technology, and Performance." Edited by Jeffrey Masten, Wendy Wall, and W. B. Worthen. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006) 185-208.

“The Popular Mechanics of Rude Mechanicals: Shakespeare and the Walls of Academe”
Shakespeare Studies 32 (2004), edited by Susan Zimmerman (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004) 295-321.

“Mathematics as a Social Formation: Mapping the Early Modern Universal”
Chapter in The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England, edited by Henry S. Turner (NY: Routledge, 2002) 255-273
Phone: 703-993-2851
Address: MSN 5E4, Cultural Studies Office
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 20030

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Papers by Denise Albanese

Corporate Ideology and Legal Myth A thesis submitted in

This thesis is an analysis of the interplay of myth and ideology in the law, with special referen... more This thesis is an analysis of the interplay of myth and ideology in the law, with special reference to problems of corporate power. The possibility of legal reform depends upon a formal autonomy of the law from the influence of ideology; because corporate law is particularly concerned with the capitalistic trends of centralization, concentration and hierarchy, liberal theory demands an especially decisive autonomy between these concerns and the interests of the ruling class. The semiological structure of law, however, has a definitively mythological character which is therefore vulnerable to ideology. The author, through an intensive study of Lochner v. New York, demonstrates the facilitation of corporate ideology through legal myth; in an extended survey of Supreme Court cases during the nineteenth century, he then sketches a history of myth using the Barthesian strategy of counter-myth. The author concludes with a brief discussion on the implications of myth and ideology for the opponents of corporate power.

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New Science, New World

Registered members may receive e-mail updates on the subjects of their choice. ... If you are req... more

The Shakespeare ﬁlm and the Americanization of culture

Shakespeare studies, 2004

Some man or other must present Wall; and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some rough-c... more Some man or other must present Wall; and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some rough-cast about him, to signify wall; and let him hold his fingers thus, through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisbe whisper. Bottom, A Midsummer Night's Dream To say that we must be as suspicious of the interests of intellectuals as we are of any other social interests is not to imply that we should or somehow could reject them. To the contrary: we can act in good faith only as long as we recognize that there is no escape from the consequences of possession of cultural capital, just as there is no way of getting outside the game of value judgment and the game of cultural distinction. Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value Constructing concepts and ... "common names" is really an activity that combines the intelligence and action of the multitude, making them work together. Constructing projects means making exist in reality a project that is a community. There is no other way to construct concepts but to work in a common way. Hardt and Negri, Empire I IF RECENT PUBLICATIONS are any indication, academic discourse in the United States about popular culture and Shakespeare constitutes a distinctive and potentially burgeoning subfield. That field is not wholly equivalent to work on Shakespeare films, although Roger Manvell, Jack Jorgens, and, more recently, Anthony Davies and Peter Donaldson, among many others, have contributed to the discourse around productions of Shakespeare in media other than print. (1) Still, each of the critics named generally reads the films as texts whose justification can be found in the self-contained and self-legitimated protocols of cinema studies, rather than as a subset of an alternative cultural formation focused on the pervasiveness of mass media, understood as standing in some contestatory relation to the cultural field for which Shakespeare is deemed metonymous. Although it has undoubtedly been influenced by the startling volume of Shakespeare-inflected films of the 1990s, and abetted by an efflorescence of references to Shakespeare on TV, in advertising, in business manuals, and other apparently exotic locations, a genealogy for pop Shakespeare would have to take into account two moments in American academia: the emergence of cultural studies as a university discipline in the United States on the one hand, and on the other, the publication of Lawrence Levine's historical account of Shakespeare's place in nineteenth-century popular culture, Highbrow-Lowbrow. (2) A systematic treatment of the genesis of cultural studies lies beyond the purview of this essay. (3) Nevertheless, a few germane aspects of its history may be isolated. While cultural studies in the United States has sometimes been considered coextensive with work on identitarian formations concerning race, gender, and sexuality, the field of Shakespeare and popular culture has taken its agenda from an object rather than an identity; in this it reveals some affinity with the work of the so-called "Birmingham School." It was Raymond Williams who famously asserted the ordinariness of "culture"--that is, culture in the anthropological sense--as an antidote to education understood as an investiture in elite signifying practices, in Culture as validated by Arnoldian and Leavisite discourse. (4) In contradistinction to a Great Tradition of English literature or an equally sacerdotal discourse of art or classical music, Williams, Richard Hoggart, Paul Willis, and others acknowledged that a curriculum of rarefied texts was inextricable from political questions: if education is a matter of class reproduction, then high literacy is a method of gatekeeping and exclusion, and reading elite texts becomes a species of epistemic violence. (5) Rather than perpetuate an Oxbridge-inflected vestment in Culture, from which working-class subjects either felt themselves alienated or from which they were, in fact, debarred by educational tracks, many Birmingham scholars focused their critical and pedagogical attention on the practices of everyday working-class life, a shift that necessarily brought to the forefront the role of mass media in the production and maintenance of that life. …

The instruction of a Christen woman

University of Illinois Press eBooks, 2002

Splendid t in terragelidam .]ux rejpicit ^ArUon ^{atnmfoehcijydtu in Hcjperia-j: fllinr ac totnm ... more Splendid t in terragelidam .]ux rejpicit ^ArUon ^{atnmfoehcijydtu in Hcjperia-j: fllinr ac totnm radii efnlfere per Orbem Viues doBrinaO-quos tnlit &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;pieas. Bi Jnan Lnis Vices. engraved hy Philippe Galle. Virornm Doctornm de Disciplinis Benemerentinm Effigies XL//22 (Antwerp: ...

Identification, Alienation, and ‘Hating the Renaissance’

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Social Dreaming and Making Shakespeare Matter

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Introduction: Shakespeare in Public

Why this, why now? A familiar pair of questions to anyone affiliated with a cultural studies prog... more Why this, why now? A familiar pair of questions to anyone affiliated with a cultural studies program, as I am, but not quite so evidently necessary in the realm of Shakespeare studies, where I also do my work. While topical criticism of Shakespeare flourished in the 1980s and into the 1990s, more recently it has fallen into abeyance, perhaps because the suspicion with which ideology critique viewed Shakespeare, as agent of hegemony and property of the ruling class, offered little possibility for a more complicated, even dialectical development.

School for Scandal? New-Media "Hamlet," Olivier, and Camp Connoisseurship

Renaissance Drama, 2005

Recent with novelty: work on the Shakespeare explosion of and nonce media coinages has tended &qu... more Recent with novelty: work on the Shakespeare explosion of and nonce media coinages has tended "Shakespop," to equate its "Shakeobject with novelty: the explosion of nonc coinages "Shakespop," "Shakesploi," "ShaXXXspeares" used to delimit the phenomenon suggests an ever-mutating hybrid, a formation whose very innovativeness beggars linguistic, let alone interpretive, ability to play catch-up.1 The emergence of new interactive technologies for the presentation of cultural goods might well necessitate rethinking acts of apprehension, especially when objects of great social authority, like Shakespeare, might be inflected thereby Equally, however, the discursive challenge of a new form ought not to blind us to the possibility that the novelty of medium serves as a screen, a site of projection: what is then obscured is an overfamiliarity, even conservatism, in the focus of transmission. When it comes to this phenomenon, not all new bottles hold new wine.

Mathematics as a Social Formation

Black and White, and Dread All Over: The Shakespeare Theatre’s ‘Photonegative’ Othello and the Body of Desdemona

Extramural Shakespeare

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2010

Reproducing Shakespeare marks the turn in adaptation studies toward recontextualization, reformat... more Reproducing Shakespeare marks the turn in adaptation studies toward recontextualization, reformatting, and media convergence. It builds on two decades of growing interest in the "afterlife" of Shakespeare, showcasing some of the best new work of this kind currently being produced. The series addresses the repurposing of Shakespeare in different technical, cultural, and performance formats, emphasizing the uses and effects of Shakespearean texts in both national and global networks of reference and communication. Studies in this series pursue a deeper understanding of how and why cultures recycle their classic works, and of the media involved in negotiating these transactions.

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The New Atlantis and the Uses of Utopia

ELH, 1990

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The Shakespeare Film, the Market, and the Americanization of Culture

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2010

The conjunction of Shakespeare and film is about as old as the medium itself. That said, the ques... more The conjunction of Shakespeare and film is about as old as the medium itself. That said, the questions that might be asked about the conjunction depend upon the historical moment being considered. Uricchio and Pearson have suggested that early cinema positioned Shakespeare as a central figure of Anglo-Saxon patrimony for non-Anglophone immigrants deemed in need of enrollment in the national imaginary; in this, cinema’s work is not so different from that undertaken contemporaneously, albeit in a significantly different register, by the College Board.1 As I’ve suggested in the preceding chapter, the College Board has bequeathed us a Shakespeare who is an inalienable part of the educational apparatus, one whose subsequent presence pervades ever-lower levels of schooling: hence my argument that Shakespeare is now a part of American public culture. But even if the specter of the pedagogical continues, at times, to attach to Shakespeare on film, it stands to reason that a century or so after the medium and the playwright first came together, the discourse about both demands repositioning for what it reveals about the mutations of the cultural field in which we might place Shakespeare, since the emergence of mass culture as such and as the other of elite culture.

Shakespeare Goes to School

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2010

In the previous chapter, I used Looking for Richard to demonstrate that these days it’s hard inde... more In the previous chapter, I used Looking for Richard to demonstrate that these days it’s hard indeed to escape the pedagogical imperative, a contradictory formation in which the demand that the public find pleasure in Shakespeare is countermanded by a quasi-evangelical practice, emerging from a range of sites, in which Shakespeare is inalienable from pedagogical agendas. The classroom thus occupies a contradictory position: it is the presumable source of disaffection in the first place, yet at the same time it often affords the tacit structuration within which that disaffection is meant to be overcome. So it is only fitting that I dedicate a chapter to Shakespeare in the schools. My purpose, however, is not to show how disaffection arises, nor to advocate for other or better approaches to teaching the plays. Disaffection, where it exists, is overdetermined and is ineluctably, even dialectically, related to the widespread demand in American culture that Shakespeare constitute a universally lovable object. As such, it far exceeds the capacity of noncollegiate instruction for countering (although I do not concede that it needs to be countered): the school is its scapegoat as vehicle of transmission, not its source.

The Shakespeare ﬁlm and the Americanization of culture