Marjorie Rubright is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD in 2007 in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan where she wrote a dissertation under the direction of Professor Valerie Traub.
Among her publications is Doppelganger Dilemmas: Anglo-Dutch Relations in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She argues that the English imagined their proximate relations with the Dutch (their nearest Continental and Protestant neighbors) by means of a cultural double vision: one which holds difference and sameness together in its scope. This relational thinking manifests itself in ideas of cultural approximation. The theme of Anglo-Dutch approximation is evident on the English stage, particularly in city comedies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, in London’s commercial architecture, and the role it plays in civic and royal pageantry, on the playbook and dictionary page, where type becomes a tool for experimenting with how difference and sameness literally can be pressed into a page, and in travel writing, pamphlet debates, and Restoration tragedy, which focus on the emerging colonial relations of the English and the Dutch in the East Indies. Across these sites of cultural production, various operations (including puns, double-entendres, visual palimpsests, typographic arrangements, and representations of mistaken identity) work to render English and Dutch identity, Englishness and Dutchness, approximate to one another.
Marjorie's recent work is published in the journals English Literary Renaissance and Dutch Crossing: A Journal of Low Country Studies. In her teaching life, Marjorie lectures on Shakespeare and teaches seminars and graduate courses on dramatic comedy, cultural identity in early modern England, and feminist and ethnic studies approaches to Renaissance literature.