I specialize in English Renaissance literature and Shakespeare. I also have research interests in ecotheory, plant studies, queer studies, and disability studies.

My first book, Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (University of Toronto Press, 2013; reprint 2017), brings into view the forest and the trees of Renaissance drama: it explores the surprising connections among Shakespeare’s theatre, drama set “in the woods,” and an environmental crisis that propagandists claimed would lead to an eco-political collapse – an unprecedented scarcity of wood and timber. I propose that, in performance, the material woodenness of theatre could have activated such environmental anxiety and temporarily mitigated it. The Society for Theatre Research short-listed it for the 2013 Theatre Book Prize.

My current research project, Marvellous Vegetables in the Renaissance (University of Toronto Press, 2025) is an extended study of John Gerard’s natural history of plants, The Herball (1597), which is considered a failure in the history of science. Despite this reputation, it has endured as an aesthetic resource. Its illustrations were used as needlework patterns, and strewn across its pages are extracts of classical poetry, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, that delight and instruct. It is little wonder that early modern poets, like Shakespeare and Milton, gathered inspiration from this storehouse of plants.

Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance offers a reparative reading of Gerard’s “failed” text, particularly its chapters on leeks, laurels, tulips, and potatoes. Through a series of experiments in speculative natural history, which require an analysis of both word and image, I distill The Herball’s logic and poetics, its distinctions and infelicities, and demonstrate the entanglements of humans and plants at the core of Shakespeare’s plays. Exploring these “cross-kingdom” encounters, Marvellous Vegetables contributes to the burgeoning field of queer ecologies by treating plant natural history as a serious intellectual resource for writing a counter-history of embodiment at the turn of the seventeenth century. All we need do, I propose, is smell the flowers.

With Stephen Guy-Bray and Will Stockton, I have edited Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Ashgate, 2009), and, with Jean E. Feerick, I have co-edited The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). More recently, with Tiffany Jo Werth, I have co-edited a volume of essays, Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination (University of Toronto Press, 2019), and with Robert W. Barrett Jr. a special issue of postmedieval called “Premodern Plants.” For 2019-20, I served as the Outgoing Director of “Oecologies: Inhabiting Premodern Worlds.”

I won a Killam Teaching Prize in 2011 and received a Dean of Arts Faculty Research Award in 2018. I was in residence at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies in 2014-15. I have received research funds from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Henry E. Huntington Library, the Shakespeare Association of America, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Insight Development, Connection, and Insight Grants). I have served as chair of the MLA Forum Executive Committee for Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities; as a Member of the MLA Delegate Assembly representing the Western US and Western Canada; and as a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. I am on the Editorial Board of Shakespeare Quarterly. If you are interested in publishing in this venue, please do not hesitate to contact me.

• Dr. Nardizzi is a founding member of the research network “Oecologies: Inhabiting Premodern Worlds” (http://oecologies.com/).

Our research collective asks how we might rethink modern “ecology” through the study of premodern natural history, taxonomy, hierarchy, and categorization; discusses the relations among terms such as N/nature, landscape, ecology, economy, environment, and technology; and asks how our regionally and temporally specific conceptions draw / differ from premodern inhabitations of the world.

Selected Publications

Books:

• Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance.
• Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees.

Edited Collections & Journal Special Issues

• Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination. Co-edited with Tiffany Jo Werth.
• “Premodern Plants,” a special issue of postmedieval. Co-edited with Robert W. Barrett, Jr.
• The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature. Co-edited with Jean E. Feerick.
• Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze. Co-edited with Stephen Guy-Bray and Will Stockton.

Articles (Published)

• “Budding Oedipus: The Oedipal Family Tree and King Lear,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 62.3 (Summer 2020): 347-66.
• “Shakespeare’s Transplant Poetics: Vegetable Blazons and the Seasons of Pyramus’s Face,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19.4 (Fall 2019): 156-77.
• “Daphne Described: Ovidian Poetry and Speculative Natural History in Gerard’s Herball,” Philological Quarterly 98.1-2 (2019): 137-56.
• “Shakespeare’s Queer Pastoral Ecology: Alienation around Arden,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 23.3 (Summer 2016): 564-82.
• “‘No Wood, No Kingdom’: Planting Genealogy, Felling Trees, and the Additions to The Spanish Tragedy,” Modern Philology 110.2 (November 2012): 202-25.
• “Shakespeare’s Globe and England’s Woods,” Shakespeare Studies 39 (2011): 54-63.
• “Shakespeare’s Penknife: Grafting and Seedless Generation in the Procreation Sonnets,” Renaissance and Reformation 32.1 (Winter 2009): 83-106.

Shorter Articles and Essays

• Contribution to ARCADE Colloquy on “Critical Semantics: New Transnational Keywords”
• Contribution to “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene: A Roundtable.” Memory Studies 11.4 (2018): 509-11.
• “Afterword.” In Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality, ed. Goran Stanivukovic (London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2017), pp. 279-94.
• “Remembering Premodern Environs.” In Object Oriented Environs, eds. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates (Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2016), pp. 179-83.
• Contribution to “Shakespeare’s Tweets: A Choir.” The Shakespearean International Yearbook (2015): 63.
• “Guest Column: Wooden Slavery,” PMLA 126.2 (March 2011): 313-15. Reprinted as “Wood.” In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, eds. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), pp. 376-78.

Published and Forthcoming Book Chapters

• “Elizabethan Drag Race.” In Early Modern Trans Drama, eds. Simone Chess and Sawyer Kemp (forthcoming in 2025).
• “Ecologies of Authorship.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Authorship, eds. Rory Loughnane and Will Sharpe (forthcoming in 2024).
• “Oecologies.” Co-authored with Tiffany Jo Werth. In Oecologies: Engaging the World, From Here, pp. 3-24.
• “Environ.” In Veer Ecology: An Ecotheory Companion, eds. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), pp. 183-95.
• “Disability Figures in Shakespeare.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 455-67.
• “Wooden Actors on the English Renaissance Stage.” In Renaissance Posthumanism, eds. Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), pp. 195-220.
• “Greener.” In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), pp. 147-69.
• “Swervings: On Human Indistinction.” Co-authored with Jean E. Feerick. In The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, pp. 1-12.
• “The Wooden Matter of Human Bodies: Prosthesis and Stump in A Larum for London.” In The Indistinct Human, pp. 119-36.
• “The Secrets of Grafting in Wroth’s Urania.” Co-authored with Miriam Jacobson. In Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, eds. Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 175-94.
• “Felling Falstaff in Windsor Park.” In Ecocritical Shakespeare, eds. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 123-38.
• “Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze.” Co-authored with Stephen Guy- Bray and Will Stockton. In Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze, pp. 1-11.
• “Grafted to Falstaff and Compounded with Catherine: Mingling Hal in the Second Tetralogy.” In Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze, pp. 149-69.

Editions

• Lady Hester Pulter, “The Heliotropians (Emblem 3)” for The Pulter Project.

Encyclopedia Articles

• “William Percy.” In The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, eds. Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. and Alan Stewart (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), pp. 777-79.
• “Thomas Randolph.” In The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, eds. Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. and Alan Stewart (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), pp. 820-21.

Associate Member, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice