Rayna Kalas
Associate Professor
Graduate Faculty Member
- Degrees
- University of Pennsylvania
Ph.D. - University of Chicago
B.A.
Bio
Rayna Kalas earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry and prose. She taught at Portland State University and held an NEH long-term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library before joining the faculty at Cornell. She is the author of Frame, Glass, Verse: the Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Cornell, 2007) and has written essays on early modern literature, logic, and poetic theory. Her current research interests include tragicomedy, intellectual labor, and the character of figurative prose in the early modern period.
Research and Teaching Interests
- 16th and 17th-century Poetry and Prose
- Literature and technology
- The labor and craft of writing
- Historical and cultural materialism
- Visual Studies
- Tragicomedy
Current Projects
- Book: Tragicomedy and the Bonds of Service in Early Modern English Writing
- Essays on Montaigne, Shakespeare, and slavery in Thomas More’s Utopia