Melissa Pullara is an early modernist who specializes in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Her doctoral thesis analyzed how the psychological affects of human encounters with the supernatural in a variety of early modern plays (including those by George Chapman, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, and William Shakespeare) implicitly manifest socio-political critiques of 16^th and 17^th century English gender and power systems. Her recent work focuses on the link between early modern accusations of witchcraft and modern discourse surrounding female abuse, looking particularly at how the dramatic revival and reinterpretation of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays where women are demonized as witches resonate differently in the #MeToo era.

She has circulated her research in a variety of peer-reviewed publications, including Arcana Naturae, The Journal of Marlowe Studies, an anthology series on Witchcraft and Religion, and the Oxford English Research Journal, and she has presented at over twenty conferences organized by early modern studies associations including the Shakespeare Association of America, the Renaissance Society of America, and the British Shakespeare Association. She has a chapter on a 2018 adaptation of Rowley and Dekker’s The Witch of Edmonton forthcoming in Palgrave’s edited collected on Cultural Trauma on the Early Modern Stage.

She spent the last year as an Assistant Professor of early modern drama at the University of New Brunswick. Before that, she served as an instructor at Seneca College and Carleton University. She has had the opportunity to teach a diverse array of courses, from fantasy and science fiction literature to medieval and early modern world history. But she loves teaching early modern literature most, particularly non-Shakespearean texts.