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Cristina Leon Alfar earned a PhD in English Literature from the University of Washington (1997).
Professor Alfar's research interests include Early Modern Drama, particularly Shakespeare, and the intersections between literature, culture, gender, and politics. She has published several articles in journals such as Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Journal X: A Journal in Culture and Criticism. Her book, entitled Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy and published by the University of Delaware Press (2003). She has articles forthcoming in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal and a collection entitled Justice, Women, and Power in English Renaissance Drama, edited by Emily Detmer-Goebel and Andrew Majeski.
Professor Alfar's new book project, entitled He Said, She Said: Shakespeare and Narratives of Marital Betrayal in Early Modern England, examines documents from the period written by both men and women along side of Shakespeare's "cuckoldry plays" as a way of examining men's and women's conflicting narratives about marital betrayal. Drawing on legal complaints, diaries, letters, conduct manuals, and marriage sermons written by women and men, Alfar traces the phantasmatic vs. material nature of men's and women's anxieties about marital betrayal in the period. In particular, the number of complaints made by women that center on the ways men abandoned their families, usually for other women, will be read against texts written by men expressing anxiety about their dependence on women. The challenges women face are productive, in Judith Butler's sense in Excitable Speech, and open spaces for women's dissent, critique, and rebellion. The "cuckoldry plays" stage that struggle, portaying women whose strategies for and negotiations of self-defense alter the ways in which we might think about women in the early modern period.
Professor Alfar currently serves as Chair of the Department.
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