Professor La Belle's publications have been concentrated in three areas: William Blake's pictorial works, issues of ideality and physicality in Shakespeare's plays, and issues of identity and physical appearance in 19th- and 20th-century texts about women. These continue to be areas of interest and exploration.
Her current research grows out of earlier work on Shakespeare's representations of sexuality and more directly out of her current teaching. During the 1997-98 academic year, she team-taught a course with Shirley Marneus, director of TACIT (Theatre Arts at Caltech), centering on Shakespeare's Henry V. Since then, they have conducted similar classes on seven other plays, including Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello. Unlike most academic courses on Shakespeare, these classes stress the plays as stage performance and incorporate into the course TACIT's production of each play. From this hands-on involvement with both teaching and stage production, La Belle's research has evolved towards some new perspectives on Shakespeare's theatricality. This emphasis also speaks to her work on the Shakespeare authorship question.
Stage history has long played a subsidiary role in Shakespeare studies. La Belle intends to make it more central by bringing to bear on the topic recent theoretical developments in performativity, Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque, and gender criticism stressing the textuality and mobility of human personality. She first explored the issues of gender and its (self) representations in her book Herself Beheld (Cornell University Press). Thus she is attempting to bring together several disparate fields and activities -- pedagogical and scholarly, psychological and theatrical.
Last updated: March 20, 2009 14:40
