A Conversation with Dr Alicia Andrzejewski
COURTESY IMAGE // ALICIA ANDRZEJEWSKI
Two years ago, the College of William and Mary’s English department welcomed a new professor, Dr Alicia Andrzejewski, who has captivated the attention of students from all backgrounds thanks to her passion for the subject she teaches and her innovative ability to accentuate the modern-day implications of works written long ago. I sat down with Dr Andrzejewski, known affectionately by her students as “Dr A,” over Zoom for an exciting discussion of her path to the College, Shakespeare’s plays from a modern perspective, and the degree to which centuries-old literature can help us think about critical problems that we face today. The following discussion has been edited for clarity.
Mary Beth: You first started teaching at William and Mary in 2019. I know the last year has felt like an eternity, but what specifically drew you to William and Mary at the time?
Dr Alicia Andrzejewski: I was working to complete my PhD at The City University of New York’s Graduate Center. I really appreciated that programme because it is known for American Studies. I applied there to work not specifically on Shakespeare but Lady Mary Wroth and other early modern authors, but it was really in one of those American Studies courses that I started thinking about “Titus Andronicus” in conversation with critical race theory. At the time, I really wanted to be in New York. My partner had a good job in publishing; I knew that I would be on the market for a long time, especially because there are just so few tenure-track jobs. But I went in to have my annual committee meeting, and I told them that I was only going to apply to places in New York, and they responded, “Well, you know, it’s near impossible to get a job without a PhD in hand these days. So why don’t you just apply everywhere and get your work out?” I did five interviews, and it came down between a three-year postdoc at Barnard and a tenure-track position at William and Mary. I didn’t grow up in the US, so honestly, I’d never heard of William and Mary. I had no idea it was “the alma mater of the nation” — this historic, prestigious school. Up until the very end, I looked at it as just a wonderful experience. Then I got the call, and I mean, I’ll admit, it was such a shock.
I guess that’s a long way of saying it was just serendipitous. What drew me to William and Mary, other than this really beautiful and unexpected chain of events, is the students. You all are brilliant. I’m still just trying to get over how many neuroscience and English double majors there are — they’re just wonderful. The English department here is just so warm and such a community. It’s not that it wasn’t that way in New York, but things are just so fast-paced — you’re all over the city all at once. I’m really enjoying the communities I form with students here and in my classrooms, as well as the support of the English department.
MB: Yes, that’s definitely something I’ve noticed during my time here — it’s such a great community. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about your background in deciding to pursue English at the collegiate level?
AA: I actually started out as a music major. I knew that I loved English. I knew I loved reading. But I sang vocal jazz, and I played alto and bari saxophone. When I started at Mars Hill College, I went to the music major meetings but, out of curiosity, the English major meetings as well. I remember during my first year, one of the professors told me I’d end up as an English major, and I was like, “Whatever.” Being a professional musician requires a lot of alone time, and it wasn’t that music education didn’t appeal to me but rather teaching in general did. I did end up staying in the bands, but I switched my major to English.
My interests are just generalist — I was hired by William and Mary as an early modern professor, but I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Virginia Woolf and Taoism. For my master’s programme, my thesis was actually on Richard Wright as a playwright and his relationship with “Othello.” Certainly, English since about my sophomore or junior year of undergrad had been my main focus, but I brought music in — I did a lot of work on jazz and Black playwrights’ writing. In my master’s programme, I stuck with Eastern religions, Taoism, and modern fiction. I’m not really sure how I landed on Shakespeare; all of my interests just fit in his canon. I was a psychology minor too — I was trying to decide between going to graduate school for psychology or English. The deciding factor for me was, first of all, that I could bring all of my interest in psychoanalysis, which is kind of a dying field, to English, and also my passion of connecting with other people. It felt like I would do better as a professor than a psychologist. I think that was a good choice. I always loved reading; I always loved Shakespeare, but it took me a couple of years to land on English.
COURTESY IMAGE // ALICIA ANDRZEJEWSKI
MB: I wanted to ask you about your research and your book which explores the topic of queer pregnancy in Shakespeare’s works. Could you speak a little bit about that topic? What drew you to it?
AA: It was actually in my master’s programme that I started noticing the tensions between feminist theory and queer theory, which troubled me. One of my mentors there helped me work through this question: “What’s the relationship between feminist theory and queer theory, and how has queer theory built off of feminism?”
I consider myself a feminist scholar. I noticed that feminist scholars in my field really wanted to hold on to concepts of binary women. When it came to pregnancy, that was almost like the last foothold — what I noticed was that queer scholars in the field were totally avoiding pregnancy as almost a symbol of heteronormative relationships and marriage. Feminist scholars have done gorgeous work on pregnancy, but there’s little engagement with queer theory. It was nobody’s fault, but it seems like reproduction and pregnancy are at the heart of that division, and how we imagine them could be informed by both. I was inspired by this divide that I felt even within the department I was in for my master’s programme. I was working on representations of abortion, which is why I went to New York, because my dissertation advisor had published one of the only big articles on abortion in Shakespeare’s plays.
As I studied more, read more, and thought more, I realised that this idea of queer pregnancy wasn’t just theoretical. It wasn’t just trying to bring together two fields of study, but it was an activist issue. Entrenched in the language that we use to describe pregnancy and pregnancies that don’t meet the promise of having a healthy child is patriarchal gender language. “Miscarriage” suggests that the pregnant person has done something wrong — it’s that idea that they carried and failed a pregnancy, when miscarriages are normal. Abortion is common and was common. I found that pregnancy and reproduction was just a really fruitful space to rethink how we imagined pregnancy in our own cultural imagination, and then take that lens and put it on Shakespeare when it doesn’t fit. My book project now is called “Rude-Growing Briars: Queer Pregnancy in Shakespeare’s Plays,” and that’s a quote from “Titus Andronicus.” I noticed that obvious pregnancies in Shakespeare’s plays are pervasive; they’re everywhere, from Hermione to his more famous pregnant characters. “All’s Well That Ends Well” is a pregnancy play. There are a lot of representations of pregnancy, but they’re also at the margins, such as the Indian votaress in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Tamora’s hidden pregnancy in “Titus Andronicus,” and Ophelia, whose herbs connect her to witches and other subversive figures for reproduction. As I worked more, I realised that I was not only interested in the obvious, pregnant characters and the young boys that played them onstage, shoving cushions under their costumes in order to do so, but also these pregnancies that are kind of whispered in the margins, and how reproduction is culturally organised. They resist those ideas of what pregnant people should look like, should be, and should do.
Ultimately, if my scholarship doesn’t work to change how we see things more broadly, beyond Shakespeare, then I’m not sure what I’m really doing when I’m sitting by myself and writing about him. I see it both as an intervention in Shakespeare studies and a larger intervention. Shakespeare is this canonical author, an institution almost, and if I can help people see pregnancies in Shakespeare in a different way, maybe they’ll see all pregnancies in a different way.
COURTESY IMAGE // ALICIA ANDRZEJEWSKI
MB: It’s evident that Shakespeare is a prominent figure in both your professional research and the literature that you teach in your classroom. Most non-English majors aren’t necessarily chomping at the bit to take a Shakespeare class. Why do you think students should be excited to take a Shakespeare course?
AA: That is a question with which I start all of my Shakespeare courses. Why are we here? Why are we doing this? I remember the first time I got the opportunity to teach a course just on Shakespeare at Queens College. When I went around the room, [the students] all said, “Well, I’m an English major. I have to be here, right?,” or “I’m going to teach high school, so you have to know Shakespeare.” I don’t think that we should ever be meeting or experiencing an author just for the sake of knowing them. I really try to ask that question every time I teach Shakespeare because there’s this idea that, even outside of English, to be a learned person or whatever, you have to be able to talk about Shakespeare. My answer to that question evolves as I teach and talk to students. I’m going to be very careful about how I articulate this because there’s a huge problem with tying contemporary stories and literature back to Shakespeare when we all know that Shakespeare pulled from other people. I’m not trying to say that studying Shakespeare is important to understanding contemporary literature because he inspired those authors. The way I design my classes and what I would say to students about taking Shakespeare is to be open about his influence, not just on other authors or on literature, but on how we tell stories, how we think of happy and sad endings, and how we think about family drama. It’s also just to think deeply about why we can’t get out from under Shakespeare. What is good about Shakespeare? What doesn’t matter? What does matter?
I like to tell the story about when I was in my PhD programme and took a class on Shakespeare’s comedy. I was exhausted, and I had forgotten that we were going to go see a production of “Twelfth Night” at 12 that night. And I was like, “I can’t get through this,” but I’ve never laughed so hard in my life. I just remember thinking that it’s magical that he can still make us laugh because comedy is so topical. I guess I would invite students to take my class, explore that question with me, and pay attention to everything from his language to his way with words. Often, I’m reading a monologue out loud to my students and in my head, I’m just like, “This is really good. Why does he have to be so good?” I like to make those discoveries with students. I like to see what they see. I guess a way of reframing that question would be to come join me. Let’s see what we can find out about what Shakespeare still has to say. I’ve never had a class where we conclude that he has nothing to say to us.
MB: This semester, you’re teaching a class called “Black Bodies in Shakespeare,” and in the past, you’ve taught “Queer Theory” and “Acts of Care in British Literature” at William and Mary. These courses deal with critical social issues facing the LGBTQ+ community, as well as violence and race. Why do you feel that it is important to discuss these contemporary topics in the context of Shakespeare or other literature?
AA: I would say that one of the most influential books I read at the Graduate Center was Bruno Latour’s “We Have Never Been Modern.” His argument concerns the Enlightenment period and that we can even look at that word and see light in it, and see how it contrasts itself to darkness. [There are] issues with that, but there is this kind of illusion that we move forward in all things because of science. I think that the best authors really do challenge those ideas of progress. Where have we moved forward or made progress in ways that are important? Where are we paralysed or stagnant because we think we’ve made progress, or think we’re modern, but not really? I think Shakespeare is a really exciting place to look at what social issues that we still face are plaguing his characters. The first Shakespeare course I taught at William and Mary was around acts of violence, and the reason I started teaching courses around violence was because now, it’s almost like we’ve forgotten how many mass shootings there were before the pandemic. I started teaching it during the Black Lives Matter movement and the #MeToo movement, thinking about all of these kinds of violence — all of the kinds of not just physical violence, but emotional violence, that we face. I think about looking at Shakespeare’s plays not for answers, but as a way to meditate more deeply on the issues that we’re facing, and how people were marginalised and continue to be marginalised. When we hit the pandemic, I just thought students were facing enough when it comes to those images; that’s why I decided to switch it and think about, well, how do characters care for each other in these pre-modern texts? What can that teach us about how to care for each other? I think that it’s really important.
COURTESY IMAGE // ALICIA ANDRZEJEWSKI
Toni Morrison is one of my guiding lights on this. It’s really important to think about politics and aesthetics together because there’s no author — not Shakespeare, not Chaucer, not Milton, not anyone — that wasn’t thinking through the political issues of the time. What ends up happening with these canonical authors that are so revered and respected is that there’s this like, false bifurcation with contemporary literature. Like Morrison and what she talks about in “Sula” — she basically says, “If I write, or Phyllis Wheatley writes, ‘the sky is blue,’ the critical questions are ‘Why is the sky blue? Why does the slave woman see the sky is blue?’” But when it comes to Shakespeare, he’s revered for aesthetics — his gorgeous language and how his plays are organised. It’s really important for me to show students that you can talk about politics and not just early modern politics alongside aesthetics. That is just as important in Shakespeare as it is in later authors that I assign and study as well.
And honestly, just going off of that, in terms of your past questions: “Why teach Shakespeare?” and “Why take Shakespeare?” my answer would be that pre-modern texts are crucial, and they inform our understanding of these concepts that translate. And so, how we think about care and how we imagine care isn’t just important in how these authors are representing it, but it’s just adding information to our ideas and adding knowledge about the history that got us to how we think about care. I think pre-modern texts are crucial, and I made this argument a lot in my graduate programme because the idea is that those authors are overstudied. I had a lot of students and colleagues joking with me about how pre-modern texts are pointless. What they were really doing is just turning the argument that a lot of stuck-up Shakespeare people put on them — that contemporary lit hasn’t stood the test of time. My whole career is based on trying to help people see how we can talk to each other and inform each other’s understandings of things like care, violence, race, gender, and sexuality — I think that’s really important.
MB: Absolutely. I wanted to ask, what has been your favourite course to teach at William and Mary so far?
AA: Honestly, I’ve loved and adored all the courses. I taught my “Queer History” and Hauntings course last semester, and it’s continuing into this semester because we formed such a tight community as a senior seminar. It was based on this idea of looking backwards to pre-martyrdom periods, but also beyond there, and thinking deeply about what it means to identify characters or historical figures as queer — what that says about our own desires and identifications. And, on the other hand, and this is a big question in my work too, how much does it matter what Shakespeare intended, or thought, or meant, or, I always hate this phrase, what early modern people thought? I think I say it in every class — we don’t all think the same way about issues. Early modern people didn’t. We really thought in that class theoretically, about those critical moods in literary studies and why they’re important, what it means to evidence them, and what methodologies we’re using when we do that.
My best friend from the Graduate Center is a medievalist, so they study trans people and trans lives in the medieval period. And I think both of us are fighting for that history because it means a lot to queer people today to know that since medieval, classical times, there has been a history of people like them. We really dug deep into that in class, and it was really, really wonderful. Now, we’re doing a one-credit class on queer life writing and memoir. I just love how vulnerable authors of memoirs are in offering their pain, struggles, and joys to us.
In “Queer Histories and Hauntings,” there is this idea of queer ghosts that live with us, whether they were documented or not. Like, here’s a queer life on the page that’s making us feel less alone. We can talk about that in class — the Indian votaress in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that appears in just one monologue. Can we evidence that her pregnancy in a relationship with Titania was more intimate? And we have Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir “In the Dream House” — a queer, bisexual woman of colour who is offering herself to an archive with so many gaps. Even though it started with older literature and now has moved to contemporary literature, it’s still the same. What guides all of my work is those connections between then and now, and I always tell my students we’re living with history whether you want to study it or not.
MB: If you could teach a course on any subject or author, what would it be?
AA: Oh, I have so many. I am going to be on a social medicine podcast soon, and it was funny because I wanted to talk about race and reproduction specifically. “Titus Andronicus” is always my go-to for that, but I wanted to think about it in conversation with Cooper Owens’s “Medical Bondage,” which talks about Black slave women in that period who were adding to medical knowledge and working with gynecologists who published research and scientific journals. She calls them “super bodies,” and she’s trying to acknowledge that they had agency and medical knowledge that they offered these gynecologists, but at the same time, they were experimented on and were thought to not feel. I started mentioning “Titus Andronicus,” and the creators of this podcast were saying, “well, let’s just do Octavia Butler’s ‘Dawn’” because they thought tying it all back to Shakespeare feels like it’s been done. I’m more than happy to talk about Octavia Butler instead of Shakespeare, and so I would love to teach a course on Black women authors and science fiction and fantasy. There are a lot of authors that mean so much to me, and I’ve already taught a lot of my dream courses here, but in every one there’s a Shakespeare play — he just always shows up.
Really anything I read and I love, the first thing I want to do is give it to my students. I just finished “Detransition, Baby” — it’s a new text about a particular trans woman’s desire to be a mother and have a family. It came out this year, January 17th, and I got it on two of my syllabi this semester!
MB: That’s awesome!
AA: I guess what I’m trying to say is that every course is my dream course because I have the freedom here at William and Mary to teach anything I love and give that to my students.
MB: My last question is about English majors. There’s a rather negative stigma surrounding the English major — it’s often viewed as impractical. What advice would you give to a student interested in pursuing an English degree?
AA: Tom Petty has this quote: “Do something you really like, and hopefully it pays the rent. As far as I’m concerned, that’s success.” I met my partner in graduate school. We were in the same English master’s programme. It wasn’t advised then to get a master’s in English and go straight to a PhD. We’ve both made our life on books, and it hasn’t been easy. But I know that this is a romantic answer, and it’s a very privileged answer, but I’ve just heard too many stories of lawyers and doctors dropping out and going to grad school. One of my favourite short stories I’ve ever read was Nam Le’s “Love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice....” He was a very successful lawyer and quit to become a writer. In the story, he’s struggling all the time with it. He has this one line, something like, “When I was a lawyer, I would have written however many words by now, and they would have mattered for someone.” It’s very hard to get out from under what it means to be a successful, productive person. Most people don’t imagine me rereading “Titus Andronicus” for the 18th time as what that looks like. But what I would say to students who want to be English majors is that there are many who have come before you, and there are many who will come after you in being brave and not listening to what anyone else is telling you to do. To circle back again to my PhD programme, I had a lot of different choices. I knew I wanted to go to New York, and I didn’t have funding, but I went to the open house anyway. My dissertation advisor stood up to give a speech, and it was still so inadvisable to get a PhD in English at the time. His speech was like, “You’re sitting here, despite the advice of parents, professors, teachers, authority figures, statistics, math — you’re still sitting here. And that’s very brave.” And so I say, celebrate that bravery and know that narratives are what we live by — the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell others. There’s no shame in wanting to study, deconstruct, and generate new narratives.
