Biography
Chris Klippenstein is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Her dissertation, "Performing Proximities: Neighbourship on the Early Modern English Stage," argues for a more capacious understanding of early modern neighbourship that emphasizes the sociospatial impact of 'atypical' neighbours including fairies, animals, and languages. Chris was a presenter on the 2023 SAA NextGenPlen and a recipient of the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. Her performance reviews have been published in a "Shakespeare, Race, and Nation" special edition of 'Shakespeare' (ed. Farah Karim-Cooper and Eoin Price) and in 'Shakespeare Bulletin;' her essay on the white nationalist implications of Shakespearean pronunciation across the long twentieth century is forthcoming in a collection published by Edinburgh UP.
In addition to her primary research interest in drama, Chris has trained in medieval paleography under Christopher Baswell and Consuelo Dutschke at Columbia, and in early modern paleography under Heather Wolfe at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where Chris was a Fellow at the 2019 Mellon Summer Institute for English Paleography. She also received a scholarship from the California Rare Book School in 2022 to attend a course on teaching primary source literacy.
Chris has taught a wide range of courses at Columbia, including "Literary Texts, Critical Methods" (Columbia's introduction to the English major) and "University Writing: Contemporary Essay," and she has been a TA for "Queer Literature, Theory, and Culture" and "Shakespeare II." Chris also worked as a Consultant for three semesters at Columbia's Writing Centre, where she was named Consultant of the Month in May 2021.
