Coppélia Kahn papers (Ms.2015.013)

Biographical / Historical

Coppélia Kahn is Professor Emerita of English at Brown University. In 1961, Kahn earned a Bachelor of Arts with honors in English from Barnard College, then a Master of Arts from the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970.

After earning her Ph.D., Kahn held teaching positions at the University of California at Berkeley (1962-1971), the University of Massachusetts (1971-1972), Wesleyan University (1973-1986), Yale University (1983), the University of California, Los Angeles (1986-7), and finally at Brown University as full Professor from 1987-present. Over the course of her teaching carreer, Kahn has taught courses on feminist literary theory, psychoanalysis and literature, Shakespeare, Early Modern English drama, and women writers, among many other topics.

In addition to being a teacher, Coppélia Kahn is the author of Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (1981) and Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (1997). She has published articles on Shakespeare's plays and poems, and on gender theory, Freud, Jacobean drama, and questions of race and nation in 20th century constructions of Shakespeare. She is co-editor of Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (1980); Shakespeare's Rough Magic: Essays in Honor of C.L. Barber (1985); Making A Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (1985); and Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism (1993). Her current research concerns the creation of Shakespeare as a cultural icon in the 19th and early 20th centuries in discourses of race and empire. In 2009, she was president of the Shakespeare Association of America.