Biography
Chris Klippenstein is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Her drama 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 a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. Her performance reviews have been published in "Shakespeare Bulletin" and in a 'Shakespeare, Race, and Nation' special issue of "Shakespeare"; her essay on the white nationalist implications of Shakespearean pronunciation across the long twentieth century is forthcoming in a collection published by Edinburgh UP.
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 teaching assistant for "Shakespeare II" and "Queer Literature, Theory, and Culture," among others. 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.
In addition to her primary research interest in drama, Chris has trained in medieval paleography at Columbia and in early modern paleography at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where she was a Fellow at the 2019 Mellon Summer Institute for English Paleography. In 2022, she received a scholarship from the California Rare Book School to attend a course on teaching primary source literacy. Because of her paleography skills, Chris has the delightful ability to reassure students that their handwriting will always be legible to her.
