Korda Authors Book on Working Women’s Role in Theatrical Production

Natasha Korda, professor of English, professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, is the author of Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2011.

Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working women’s behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeare’s time. Korda reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives, daughters and widows of theater people who worked actively alongside their male kin; and immigrant women who fueled the fashion-driven stage with a range of newfangled skills and commodities.

Korda also is the co-editor of Working Subjects in Early Modern Europe, published by Ashgate Press in 2011.

In addition, Korda received a one-month International Visiting Fellowship at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom in 2012.