Alfar, Cristina

  Associate Professor
  1212AHW / Office Hour:
  (212) 772-5187
  calfar@hunter.cuny.edu

Cristina Leon Alfar earned a PhD in English Literature from the University of Washington (1997).

Her 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), examines the socio-political basis of Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale to argue that women characters traditionally identified as evil might instead be read as pressing against early modern popular beliefs about female nature, so that the tragedies stage a complex interrogation of the dynamics of gender and power. 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-Goebeland Andrew Majeski.

Professor Alfar has begun research on a new book project entitled He Said, She Said:  Shakespeare and Narratives of Marital Betrayal in Modern England, which 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 study argues that women's anxieties about men's abuse of their powers in marriage open spaces of agency in oppressive systems of ideology, law, domestic and monarchical politics. Yet, Alfar argues, the challenge, the adversity, the attempted control of the woman is productive, in Judith Butler's sense in Excitable Speech, and opens spaces for women's dissent, critique, and rebellion.  The "cuckoldry plays" stage that struggle, portaying women whose strategies for and negotiations of agency 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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