Whitney Sperrazza

I specialize in sixteenth and seventeenth-century English poetry and women’s writing, with a particular focus on the material and embodied dimensions of women’s texts. My first book project explores the unexpected collisions among women’s writing, poetic form, and Renaissance anatomy. I earned my doctorate at Indiana University Bloomington, and am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Hall Center for the Humanities, University of Kansas.

In the digital realm, my work sits at the intersection between big data methods and digital maker culture. Focusing on representations of sexual violence in early modern poetry and drama, I use computational analysis to uncover features of these representations that shape our reading experience, yet often go undetected in traditional humanist analysis. My aim is to extend this research into a haptic register, creating material objects from the computational analysis that demonstrate--tactilely--the discursive texture of sexual violence.