Paul Whitfield White
- Professor // English
- Professor // Medieval and Renaissance Studies // SIS
- Affiliated Faculty // Film and Video Production // Rueff School
- Professor // SIS
Office and Contact
Room: SC 292
Email: pwhite@purdue.edu
Shakespeare, Renaissance Literature
Research Areas:
Drama history and dramatic theory; Shakespeare; medieval drama; religion and culture of Tudor and early Stuart England
Professor White is P-I of “Shakespeare’s Theaterscape: Mapping Playhouse Communities in Early Modern London,” a three-year National Endowement of Humanities Collaborative Research project. The award of $250,000 was announced in August 2023. He leads a research team of internationally recognized scholars to explore the districts of four London playhouses in the time of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
In 2008 Professor White published Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society, 1485-1660 (Cambridge UP). His other books include Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge UP, 1993); Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe (AMS, 1998), which he edited for the Marlowe Society of America; and Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 2002), co-edited with Suzanne R. Westfall.
Professor White was creative director of the joint Purdue English/Theatre production of the Elizabethan play The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, supported by a generous grant from CLA’s Enhancing Research in the Arts and Humanities. First staged for public viewing in West Lafayette in June 2015, the play was then performed at the Festival of Early Theatre at the University of Toronto later that month. The ERAH grant also is supporting the digital edition of the play in performance, edited by Professor White and doctoral student Bryan Nakawaki. Both wrote papers on the project for the Performance as Research Conference at McMaster University in June 2016. Professor has two article forthcoming this year: “Early English Acting Companies to 1580,” in the Oxford Handbook of English Literature Online, and “Were Early English Minstrels and Players “Professional?” in Research in Medieval and Renaissance Drama.
Winner of the Department of English Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching, he has taught Introduction to Graduate Studies (50100), Early English Survey (Engl 24000), Introduction to Drama (23500) Shakespeare (Engl 44200), Medieval Drama in English Society (Engl 52700), and Carnival and Early English Theater (Engl 63300). Professor White served as Director of Graduate Studies from 2000 to 2003.