Holly Dugan
Associate Professor of English
Holly Dugan is an Associate Professor of English as well as the former program head (2024-2026) of the Theatre and Dance Program at the Corcoran School of Arts and Design at GWU. She is the recipient of several teaching awards, including The Award for Excellence in Graduate Faculty Mentoring (2025), the Kenny Prize for innovation in teaching of introductory courses (2017), and Morton A. Bender Teaching award for outstanding teaching (2013). She has been awarded short-term fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library. She has served on the advisory boards of Odeuropa and the Poetics of Olfaction, two major research initiatives on the history of olfaction, as well as Box Office Bears: Animal Baiting in Early Modern England.
Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare Studies, History of the Seness, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Animal Studies, and Theatre History
My scholarship focuses on the role of literature as an archive of history, including histories of embodiment, the senses, gender fluidity, and sexuality as well as performance and animality.
My first book, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (JHUP, 2011), addressed the challenge of historicizing olfaction by embracing the ephemerality of smell itself. Taking perfume as my object of analysis, an object that is powerful as well as invisible and ephemeral, I argued for a different definition of what constitutes materiality. I showed that there were substantial archives that document how early modern men and women produced, consumed and represented scents and their atmospheric effects, despite understandings of scents as invisible, fleeting, and illusive. This evidence revealed how early modern people understood the boundaries between their bodies and the environment.
My second book, Shakespeare and the Senses, builds on this work and expands it to include the other senses by addressing a significant gap in theatre history. Though we know much about the textual history of Shakespeare’s plays and we’re learning more about the physical dimensions early modern London’s playhouses, we still know very little about how playgoers made sense of Shakespeare’s plays in their earliest performance contexts. This book takes up that question, arguing that understanding the paradox of staging sensation in early modern London’s theaters provides a fascinating starting point for understanding the paradox of sensation: that it is both visceral and socially constructed. Shakespeare’s language reveals how playwrights used staged sensation to influence the phenomenological experience of playgoing.
My research also focuses on critical animal studies. My current book project, “The Famous Ape,” examines animal history via performance history by studying how humans have treated—and trained—their closest animal relatives: apes. First arriving as specimens during the sixteenth century, apes and aping were key to Renaissance performance practices, establishing paradigms of mimicry that would continue for centuries to come. This book examines why this continues to be such a source of fascination, studying aping as both a performance strategy and cultural index of what constitutes the human. To do this, I embrace animal biography, focusing on the simian celebrities renowned in their own time for aping the best and worst qualities of people.
I received my PhD in English & in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Michigan.
- Literature and Financial Imagination
- English Renaissance: Radical Books in the Age of Print
- Gender and Literature: Early Modern Women Writers
- Shakespeare and Early Modern London
- Milton's Paradise Lost and its Afterlives
- Reading the Human in the Humanities
The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
Shakespeare and the Senses. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2026.
Edited Collections
Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Animals. Eds. Holly Dugan and Karen Raber. New York: Routledge, 2019.
Selected Refereed Articles
"Simian" in Logomotives: Words that Changed the World. Eds. Marjorie Rubright and Stephen Spiess. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025, pages 280-294.
"Festering Lilies: Seeing and Smelling Race and Gender in Renaissance Art and Poetry," in Literature and the Senses, eds. Annette Kern-Stahler and Elizabeth Robertson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
"Early Modern Tranimals: 57312*". Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Volume 19, Issue 4, 2019, 178-205.
Co-authored refereed articles
with Dolsy Smith, "Untimely Models," PMLA, Volume 139, Issue 3: May 2024, pages 516-21.
with Leah Richardson, "A Pedagogy of Possibility: Towards Transformative Learning in Special Collections," Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 9 (2023), https://cjal.ca/index.php/capal/article/view/40961 .
Ph.D., University of Michigan
M.A. University of Michigan
B.A., Douglass College, Rutgers University