2020 LYCOMING COLLEGE SPRING MAGAZINE

F A C U L T Y S P O T L I G H T To thine own self be true. M When did you first become interested in literature? To be honest, I have always loved literature and its ability to spark my imagination. I was a voracious reader growing up and practically lived at the local library when I was a kid. I definitely got that from my dad, as he used to spend almost as much time as I did at the library! Some of my fondest memories are of us sitting in the living room, both quietly absorbed in our books. I always had literature in the back of my mind as a potential college major, but I actually thought I would be a classics major when I first arrived in undergrad. It didn’t take me long to realize that classics wasn’t a good fit, so I transitioned into English, initially thinking I might focus on medieval literature but soon realized that that was not a great fit either. I moved even further forward in terms of time period, and when I hit Renaissance lit — particularly Shakespeare and Renaissance drama — it clicked and I became hooked. M E G H AN C . AN D R EWS , P H . D . A S S I S TA N T P R O F E S S O R O F E N G L I S H eghan Andrews, Ph.D., is an early modernist whose research focuses on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. At Lycoming, she teaches not only Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but everything from classical to contemporary literature. Andrews is the recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies Project Development Grant for her current book project, “Shakespeare’s Networks,” which uses a very modern lens to reexamine what Shakespeare’s plays meant in their moment. “The project covers basically all of Shakespeare’s career,” she comments. “I start with the history plays he wrote around 1590 and end with his last plays written in 1613/14, and all of the different genres in which he wrote: comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. In that sense, while it’s not a biography or literary biography, it does offer a new account of Shakespeare’s creative life.” The plays that come in for special attention include Troilus and Cressida , All’s Well that Ends Well , Henry VIII , Julius Caesar , Antony and Cleopatra , Coriolanus , and The Two Noble Kinsmen , though Andrews touches on some more familiar plays as well.      28 LYCOMING COLLEGE 2020 SPRING MAGAZINE