Theatre Studies Adjunct Instructor Christina M. Squitieri has received her PhD in English Literature from NYU's Graduate School of Arts and Science.
Her dissertation, "Theatrical Transformation and the Limitation of Identity on the Shakespearean Stage” analyzes how early modern theatricality—framed through the lenses of costume, speech, and gesture—is able to impose a discrete identity onto a character that is difficult to remove at the end of the play, "challenging our understanding of the freedom of theatrical transformation to argue, instead, that plays often present the limitation of identities through the same theatrical processes that create them," Squitieri explained.
Working with plays by Shakespeare, Dekker, Marlowe, and Middleton, she demands a shift in our understanding of both the perceived power of theatricality and the way identity, including a theatrically-created “selfness,” was understood to be shaped in the early modern playhouse.
She is also the proud recipient of the 2019 Dean's Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award in the Humanities, an award given to the top graduate student teacher in NYU's Humanities Division of GSAS.
This spring, she will be presenting research on women's political power in Shakespeare's Richard II and organized a panel, "Early Modern Resistance and Resilience," at the Renaissance Society of America Conference, and will be presenting a paper on the identity of Christopher Sly in the Induction scenes in Taming of the Shrew, at the 2020 Shakespeare Association of America Convention.