Women Who Kill
Fall 2025 Honors Seminar ~ Topics/Histories
WOMEN WHO KILL
Professor Carol Martin
cm7@nyu.edu
THEA-UT 801.001
Tuesdays 2:00-4:45 pm
Female murderers are portrayed as unnatural, manlike, willful, passionate, sexually crazed, and plotting among other things. They disrupt legal, social, and political ideas about gender, relationships with children, parents, love, and violence. Plays about women who kill forge connections between a distant or near past and the present. British suffragists, for example, used Medea’s ‘women of Corinth’ speech as a rallying cry for the delimited legal rights of women. But who are women who kill really? What is the relationship between fictional and nonfictional female murders? What are the economic and legal circumstances of women at the time of the murders? Are there recurring reasons for who, how, and why do women kill? Are there common plot structures, characters, and theatrical styles? In this Seminar, we will study the portrayal of women who kill in the contexts of the historical moment of the authorship, the circumstances in which the protagonists find themselves, and the motives that inform their murders. We will read plays and articles by legal scholars, scholars of feminism, and theatre scholars as well as watch films featuring women murders. Medea, Agamemnon, Song of Death, Yerma, Blood Relations, Trifles, Machinal, Kokoro (True Heart), Tea, My Sister in This House, and The Maids. Students in the course must purchase specific physical copies of the plays and bring them to class. No open laptops, Ipads, or phones.
Request accommodations here.
Fall 2025 Honors Seminar ~ Topics/Histories
WOMEN WHO KILL
Professor Carol Martin
cm7@nyu.edu
THEA-UT 801.001
Tuesdays 2:00-4:45 pm
Female murderers are portrayed as unnatural, manlike, willful, passionate, sexually crazed, and plotting among other things. They disrupt legal, social, and political ideas about gender, relationships with children, parents, love, and violence. Plays about women who kill forge connections between a distant or near past and the present. British suffragists, for example, used Medea’s ‘women of Corinth’ speech as a rallying cry for the delimited legal rights of women. But who are women who kill really? What is the relationship between fictional and nonfictional female murders? What are the economic and legal circumstances of women at the time of the murders? Are there recurring reasons for who, how, and why do women kill? Are there common plot structures, characters, and theatrical styles? In this Seminar, we will study the portrayal of women who kill in the contexts of the historical moment of the authorship, the circumstances in which the protagonists find themselves, and the motives that inform their murders. We will read plays and articles by legal scholars, scholars of feminism, and theatre scholars as well as watch films featuring women murders. Medea, Agamemnon, Song of Death, Yerma, Blood Relations, Trifles, Machinal, Kokoro (True Heart), Tea, My Sister in This House, and The Maids. Students in the course must purchase specific physical copies of the plays and bring them to class. No open laptops, Ipads, or phones.
Request disability accommodations here.