Collaborator
Jane Hwang Degenhardt is associate professor in the department of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (2010) and co-editor of Religion and Drama in Early Modern England (2011). As a scholar and teacher, Jane is interested early modern globalizing processes, dramatic representation and the nature of performance, and the conversion of trauma into narrative. She is currently working on a book that explores evolving understandings of “fortune” in early modern England. This study demonstrates how the idea of fortune–signifying luck and chance but also a new concept of wealth that was earned rather than inherited–helped to foster England’s global economic expansion and the early formation of the British empire.