Rosalind Kerr, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus, Drama, University of Alberta
Fellow, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at Victoria University in the University of Toronto
Email: rosalind.kerr@ualberta.ca
I am currently based in Toronto and hold a fellowship at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at Victoria University (University of Toronto). As a professor in the Drama Department at the University of Alberta, from 1997-2012, I was interested in approaching Theatre and Performance Studies from the perspective of the role that theatre performance plays in challenging the dominant social values of its time. I found my experience as a dramaturg, director and actor invaluable in making connections between the written and the performance texts and encouraged my students to integrate theory and practice. I am excited by the hypermedial potential of theatre to incorporate all the other arts, and, as such, to reinvent itself each time a new technology changes the way we perceive the world. Most of my research has focused on the re/presentation of the gendered body and the multiple ways in which it signifies meanings on the stage. My interests in feminist and queer theatre/theory link my two distinct areas of specialization. I have published on contemporary Canadian experimental and queer theatre and more recently have concentrated on sixteenth-century Italian commedia dell’arte actresses and their impact on shaping the early modern stage.
My research on the actresses was generously supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Grant awarded by the Canadian government. The most significant outcome of this research is my book, The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’Arte Stage, published by the University of Toronto Press in 2015. Seamlessly integrating the Italian and English scholarly literature on the subject, The Rise of the Diva is an insightful analysis of one of the modern world’s first celebrity cultures.
Since then, I have continued to explore various facets of the transnational legacy of the Italian actresses in shaping the early modern European stage. I have published articles, and chapters, most recently: “‘Boying Their Greatness’: Transnational Effects of the Italian Divas on the Shakespearean Stage” in The Routledge Research Companion to Anglo American Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michele Marrapodi, 342-357, London: Taylor and Francis, Routledge: 2019. My research here touches on the influence that the Italian divas had on shaping the Shakespearean female characters on the all-male stage. I address these issues more from the Italian side in “How the Commedia dell’Arte Actress Revolutionized the Early Modern Stage.”Quaderni d’Italianistica. 36.1 (2015): 115-137. My “Sex and the Satyr in the Pastoral Tradition: Isabella Andreini’s La Mirtilla as Pro-feminist Erotica” in Magic, Marriage, Midwifery: Eroticism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Ian Frederick Moulton, 141-168, Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers. 2015, stressed Andreini’s tongue-in-cheek treatment of female sexual desire.
I also found a surprising correspondence between Isabella Andreini and Lady Gaga in their pursuit of celebrity in “The Fame Monster: Diva Worship from Isabella Andreini to Lady Gaga.” The Diva in Modern Italian Culture: Italian Studies, 70.3 (August 2015): 402-415.
Recently, I have been exploring other facets of the Commedia dell’arte to discover what it can tell us about important new cultural practices as the masses flocked into the cities to find employment. I’m concerned with exploring the ways the commedia dell’arte mirrored changing social conditions and their effect on the average citizen, and especially women. Much of this research appears in my edited translation of Flaminio Scala’s il finto marito (1618). The Fake Husband offers scholars and performers a workable text to study both for its literary merits and its stage worthiness as a brilliant comedy.
In the Fall of 2020, I held a Goggio Distinguished Visiting Professor Appointment in the Department of Italian Studies, University of Toronto. My graduate course, “The Actress and the Golden Age of the Commedia dell’Arte,” was designed to widen the appreciation for the early Italian commedia dell’arte female performers who raised the commedia to a high art form. We also connected their achievements as the first divas to the formation of a celebrity culture already burgeoning in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italy, where the commedia dell’arte flourished in the marketplace as well as the courts.
I also delivered two public Goggio lectures: The first on “The Rise of the Diva and the Circulation of Endless Desire” and the second “She’s the Man!” Transnational Transvestisms from Italy’s Commedia dell’Arte to Shakespeare’s Boy Actors.”
Rosalind Kerr 