Joyce MacDonald

Professor

Joyce Green MacDonald is the author of two books: Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory in the New World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge University Press, 2002), She has published widely on Shakespeare, adaptation, Renaissance classicism, and early modern ideas about race. A former trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, in 2026 she will begin a three-year term as articles editor for Renaissance Quarterly, and is also a current member of the editorial boards of the journals Shakespeare Studies and Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Recent projects include the introductory essay for a new edition of Toni Morrison's Desdemona (Bloomsbury, 2024), a modernized edition of Restoration playwright Aphra Behn's only tragedy, Abdelazer, included in Restoration Women's Drama: Four Plays 1662-1677 (Toronto, 2026), and recording the audio guide (along with actress Adjoa Andoh and Shakespeare scholar Kim Hall) for an exhibit on black women's involvement with Shakespeare opening at the Folger Shakespeare Library in October 2026.

Contact Information

joyce.macdonald@uky.edu

1223 Patterson Office Tower

(859)-257-6987

Education

M. A. and Ph.D., Vanderbilt University

A. B., Dartmouth College

Research Interests

Shakespeare
Performance
Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Literature and Culture
Gender and Women's Writing

Affiliations

English

Selected Publications

Selected Publications:

Selected Articles and Book Chapters:

"Male Friendship in Antony and Cleopatra." Forthcoming in Imagining Antiquity in Shakespeare's England, ed. Heather James and Andrew Wallace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026).
“Remembering Shakespeare's Sonnets in Caroline Randall Williams' Lucy Negro, Redux.” Shakespeare Survey 77 (2024): 1-11.
"Caesar, and Caesarism, Now." In Shakespeare and the Poetics and Politics of Relevance, ed. Dympna Callaghan and Sophie Chiari (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024): 121-135.
"Shakespeare, Race, and Adaptation." In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, ed. Patricia Akhimie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 103-118.
"Interracial Sex and Narrative Crisis in The Woman of Colour." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 35.1 (2023)<https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:61ba8957-1ef3-346a-b74e-646e0d418bcf>
"Disrupting White Genealogies in Cymbeline." In White People in Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Little, Jr. (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 137-149.
"How Race Might Help Us Find 'Lost' Women's Writing." Criticism 63.1-2 (2021): 45-53.
"Actresses of Color and Shakespearean Performance: The Question of Reception." In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, ed. Ayanna Thompson (Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 208-222.