Jill P Ingram

Jill Ingram is a Professor of Humanities at the Civitas Institute and a fellow in the Program on Humanities and the Western Tradition at the University of Texas at Austin.

Before joining the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, Jill Ingram was Professor of Humanities in the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. She previously taught English literature at Ohio University and Macalester College. At Civitas, Dr. Ingram continues her work on Shakespeare and medieval and Renaissance literature, including her research on the intersection of economics and literature in the English Renaissance.

Dr. Ingram is the author of three books, in addition to book chapters, and articles. In Festive Enterprise: The Business of Drama in Medieval and Renaissance England (Series: ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern), (Notre Dame Press, 2021), she merges the history of economic thought with studies of theatricality and spectatorship to examine how English Renaissance plays employed forms and practices from medieval and traditional entertainments to signal the expectation of giving from their audiences. She reveals how early moderns borrowed the techniques of medieval money-gatherers to signal communal obligations and rewards for charitable support of theatrical endeavors. Most importantly, she demonstrates that economics and drama cannot be considered as separate enterprises in the medieval and Renaissance periods, and that marketplace pressures were at the heart of dramatic form in medieval and Renaissance drama alike.

Dr. Ingram also studies theater history and festive culture, with a particular interest in London’s Lord Mayor’s shows in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The procession, marking the mayor’s inauguration, continues today.

She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the Earhart Foundation, among others.

Dr. Ingram received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, and an M.A. in English from the University of California at Davis. She holds two B.A.s, one in English from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and the other in journalism from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Books

Festive Enterprise: The Business of Drama in Medieval and Renaissance England (Notre Dame Press, Series: ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern [James Simpson, David Aers, and Sarah Beckwith, eds.] March 2021).

William Shakespeare: Love’s Labour’s Lost, (The New Kittredge Shakespeare, Focus Publishing, 2011).

Idioms of Self-Interest: Credit, Identity and Property in English Renaissance Literature (Routledge, 2006; reissued paperback, 2009).

Articles

“Michael Bristol’s Heuristics of Carnival in London’s Civic Pageantry,” (Shakespeare Studies 51 [2023])

“’Hick scorners jestes’: Martin’s Month’s Mind and the Tudor Dramatic Tradition,” English Literary Renaissance 53:2 (Spring 2023)

“Rogationtide Perambulation as Performative Law,” in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 51:3 (Sept. 2021)

“‘You ha’done me a charitable office’: Autolycus and the Economics of Festivity in The Winter’s Tale,” Renascence 64:2 (Fall 2012), 63–72.

“Interview with Dominic Dromgoole,” Shakespeare Newsletter 61:2 (Fall 2011), 57–60.

“Avant-garde Conformists and Student Revels at Oxford, 1607-8,” Anglican and Episcopal History 80:4 (December 2011), 349–372.

“Laughing at the Last Will: Jyl of Braintford’s Testament,” English Language Notes 48.1 (Spring/Summer 2010), 41–48.

“A Case for Credit: Isabella Whitney’s ‘Wyll and Testament’ and the Mock Testament Tradition,” Early Modern Culture Vol. 1 (Fall 2005).

“The ‘noble lie’: Casuistry and Machiavellian Self-Interest in The Duchess of Malfi,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 31:1 (Summer 2005), 135–160.

“Economies of Obligation in Eastward Ho!” The Ben Jonson Journal 11:1 (Fall 2004), 21–40.

Chapters

“Financial Encounter Customs: Tradition and Form in London’s Civic Pageantry,” in Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London, eds. Caitlin Finlayson and Amrita Sen (London: Taylor and Francis, 2020), chapter 7.

“Gascoigne’s Supposes: Englishing Italian ‘error’ and adversarial reading practices” in Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Ashgate, 2007), 83–96.

Book Reviews

Greg Walker, John Heywood: Comedy and Survival in Tudor England, in Reformation 27:1 (May 2022), 92–94.

Bradley D. Ryner, Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing, 1600-1642, in The Review of English Studies 66:273 (February 2015), 174–176.

Suzanne M. Tartamella, Rethinking Shakespeare’s Skepticism: The Aesthetics of Doubt in the Sonnets and Plays, in The Sixteenth Century Journal 45:4 (February 2014), 1066-1068.

Gordon McMullan and David Matthews (eds.), Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, in Archives 33:118 (April 2008), 96-98.