Penelope Meyers Usher
Department
English, First Year Foundation
Office
Office Hours
Contact
Penelope Meyers Usher works on early modern English literature, particularly drama, with a focus on representations of the body. Her most recent work revolves around death (and un-death): ghosts, zombies, figures who die, and figures who refuse to remain dead. She is particularly interested in the indeterminate nature of the body with respect to death, and her most recent essay—“(Un)Dead Again: Dying and Undying in The Duchess of Malfi”—explores how John Webster’s 1614 tragedy works to undo any stable notion of what it means to die, to be dead, and to stay dead. Her other scholarly interests include: classical literature; plague; violence; and true crime.
She is a Barnard alumna with a B.A. in Comparative Literature, and holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from New York University. Her work has been published in Postmedieval; The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (JMEMS); Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England; Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study (Routledge, 2018); Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology: A Dictionary (Bloomsbury, 2024); and Queering Early Modern Death in England: Figuration, Representation, and Matter (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Ph.D., English, New York University
M.A., English, New York University
B.A., Comparative Literature (French and English), Barnard College
“(Un)dead Again: Dying and Undying in The Duchess of Malfi,” in Queering Early Modern Death in England: Figuration, Representation, and Matter, ed. Lauren Shohet and Christine Varnado (Arden Bloomsbury, 2025).
“Philomel,” “Procne,” “Pandion,” “Ate,” “Vestal,” “Nymph,” and “Ovid,” in Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology: A Dictionary, ed. Janice Valls-Russell and Katherine Heavey (Arden Bloomsbury, 2024).
“‘The Carcasse Speakes’: Vital Corpses and Prophetic Remains in Thomas May’s Antigone,” Postmedieval 10:1 (2019): 82-94.
“Greek Sacrifice in Shakespeare's Rome: Titus Andronicus and Iphigenia in Aulis,” in Rethinking Shakespearean Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies, ed. Dennis Britton and Melissa Walter (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 206–224.
"'I Do Understand Your Inside': The Animal Beneath the Skin in Webster's Duchess of Malfi," Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 30 (2017): 105-125.
“Pricking in Virgil: Early Modern Prophetic Phronesis and the Sortes Virgilianae,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45:3 (2015): 557–571.
- Early modern literature
- Shakespeare and Renaissance drama
- Classical Traditions
- Death
2025 recipient of the Teaching Excellence Award
I approach First-Year Writing as an opportunity to help students find, craft, and value their voice. I firmly believe that academic writing need not be dry, and it need not be formulaic. Academic writing can be playful and lively and rich; it can take all sorts of different shapes and forms; and it need not ‘shut out’ a writer’s own personal experiences, identity, and perspectives. Rather than teaching my students to emulate or conform to a particular formula for academic writing, thus, I encourage them to experiment, I encourage them to see what happens when they try out new approaches, and I encourage them to value their own individual voice. My goal is for students to leave my class feeling more confident about their writing—not just because they know how to formulate a strong thesis statement, but because they feel more connected to their own voice, more free to experiment, and more conscious of the various choices and moves they’re making when they put words on the page.
Central to my teaching (and, indeed, to my own writing and scholarship) is close reading. Close reading—as I teach it—involves attending not just to “what” a text says but to how a text says it. Adopting this approach, students in my First-Year Writing class will get into the habit of slowing down in their reading practice, paying close attention to details like word choice and sentence structure. I value close reading because it encourages us to interrogate the words and images we encounter, to resist oversimplification, to embrace nuance and complexity, and to ask questions (of texts, of ideas, of one another, and of the world around us). I believe that close reading paves the way for sophisticated critical thinking and for rich, compelling writing.
I prioritize creating a class community characterized by respect and care. I believe that the most meaningful learning happens when everyone in the classroom—myself included—approaches our work together with openness, curiosity, and a willingness to grow. For this reason, I call upon my students to listen and learn from one another, to show up with an open mind, and to value different perspectives. I value each of my students as individuals, and I value the things I learn from them and the relationships I form with them. Getting to know my students allows me to be a better teacher—it allows me to ask more informed and generative questions of them, it allows me to recognize and appreciate the individuality of their writing and thinking, and it allows me to tailor my feedback to best support their growth as writers.