Arkansas State to kick off Women’s History Month with “Elizabeth 1: The Dating Game”

JONESBORO, Ark. — Arkansas State University will kick off Women’s History Month Friday, March 1, with the presentation of Carole Levin’s “Elizabeth 1: The Dating Game,” in Wilson Hall Auditorium, 2405 Aggie Way, from 4:30-6:30 p.m. Admission is free and open to the public.

The work is presented by the Women’s and Gender Studies Group at ASU, in conjunction with the Office of the Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Department of English and Philosophy, and the History Department.

“Elizabeth 1: The Dating Game,” is a short original comedy by Levin about a single working woman negotiating a man’s world. Levin is Willa Cather Professor of History and Director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at the University of Nebraska where she specializes in early modern English women’s and cultural history. She earned her Ph.D. from Tufts University.

Her books include Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age, coauthored with John Watkins (Cornell University Press, 2009); Dreaming the English Renaissance: Politics and Desire in Court and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); The Reign of Elizabeth I (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth 1 and the Politics of Sex and Power (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), which was named one of the top ten academic books of the 1990s by the readers of Lingua Franca. 

She has worked on two major exhibits, "Elizabeth 1: Ruler and Legend" at the Newberry Library in Chicago and "To Sleep Perchance to Dream" at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. She has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities long-term fellowships. She is the past president of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, the co-founder and president of the Queen Elizabeth 1 Society, and is Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.