University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Jennifer Park is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Her research interests and specializations include early modern literature, in particular dramatic literature and Shakespeare, food and culinary history, Renaissance recipes, race and transcultural studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the history of science and medicine. Her dissertation, “Immortal Longings: Towards a Poetics of Preservation on the Early Modern Stage,” engages with discourses about race and geography, women’s reproductive health, genre, and material culture, and has earned her the Howell-Voitle Award for Outstanding Work on a Dissertation in the Early Modern Period by the Department of English at UNC. The project locates some of the richest metaphorical manifestations of immortality and/or corruption—like the powder of embalmed bodies and the philosopher’s stone—on stage, in performance, to examine how performative preservation provides early moderns with a fertile site for experimenting with change and flexibility in permanence. She has written on the cultural history of Cleopatra’s recipes in early modern literature, in “Discandying Cleopatra,” forthcoming in Studies in Philology, and on gendered knowledge construction in the works of Margaret Cavendish and Francis Godwin in Renaissance and Reformation. Other current projects include a chapter on blood, feeding, and black bodies for an edited volume on Food and Literature, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and a chapter on instructional books and game play for an edited volume on early modern games.