Background
Bailey Sincox's research spans the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, gender studies, reception and adaptation studies (including theater, film and the novel), and history of the book. At Binghamton, she teaches World Literature I and II as well as courses on 16th- and 17th-century English works.
Her first book project, Getting Even: Gender, Genre, and the Revenge Plot in Early Modern Drama and Contemporary Film, conducts a conversation between Shakespeare’s time and our own about the stakes of representing female revenge. While analyzing recent films to rethink early modern stories of justice-seeking beyond Hamlet, the book also mobilizes 16th- and 17th-century plays to defamiliarize contemporary constructions of femininity. Toggling between these two archives of popular entertainment, Getting Even argues that the female revenge plot maintains its cultural currency by continually transforming the relationship between sex, gender, and genre.
Her academic writing has appeared in venues including Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare, Notes and Queries, The Seventeenth Century Journal, English Literary Renaissance and The Review of English Studies; she has also written academic reviews for Shakespeare Bulletin and Renaissance Quarterly. Beyond the academy, her writing has appeared in The Drift, Harvard Review, The Rambling, The Fence, Public Books and Los Angeles Review of Books. She is working on a new introduction to Much Ado About Nothing for the Oxford World's Classics editions of Shakespeare.
Before coming to Binghamton, she was a Perkins-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Select Publications
- “Rhodes’s ‘Fair Example:’ Tyranny, Race, and the Orient in The Maid’s Tragedy,” English Literary Renaissance 55, no. 2 (2025): 208-36.
- “‘Shun’d of humane fellowships’: Civility and Animality in The Unnaturall Combat,” The Seventeenth Century 39, no. 4 special issue “The Uses and Abuses of Civility” (2024): 907-22.
- “‘On Latmos’s Top:’ Cynthia’s Sexuality in The Maid’s Tragedy,” Notes & Queries 71, no. 1 (2024): 76-80.
- “Taking Shakespeare in Stride: Lady Macbeth at the American Repertory Theater,” Shakespeare 20, no. 2 special issue “Shakespeare in Action” (2024): 281-300.
- “Epicene: Female Revenge in the Husband-Taming Comedy,” Shakespeare Studies 51 (2023): 119-24.
- “The Sexual Politics of Paratexts: John Day’s Gorboduc,” Review of English Studies 74, no. 314 (2023): 222-36.
- “Ralph Ellison’s Macbeth,” Notes & Queries 70, no. 2 (2023): 120-3.
- “Looking for Perdita in Ali Smith’s Summer,” Shakespeare Survey 75 (2022): 229-39.
- “Illuminated and Unsettled: Literary Forms and Cultural Power, Medieval to Early Modern, a Houghton Library Pop-up Exhibition in Honor of James Simpson,” Harvard Library Bulletin (2022).
- “A Missed Shakespeare-Ariosto Connection,” Notes & Queries 68, no. 1 (2021): 127-9.
- “Resistance and Reconciliation in Roundabout’s ‘Feminist Update’ to Kiss Me, Kate,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 13 (2021).
- “The Winter’s Tale and Revenge Tragedy,” Shakespeare Studies 47 (2019): 233–60.
Education
- PhD, MA, Harvard University
- MSt, University of Oxford
- BA, Duke University
Research Interests
- 16th- and 17th-century English drama
- Theater studies
- Gender studies
- Reception and adaptation studies
- History of the book
Teaching Interests
- Drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries
- Classics (in translation)
- Traditions and canons of "world literature"
Awards
- Folger Shakespeare Library Annual Colloquium Fellowship (2024-25)
- Magic Grant for Innovation, Princeton Humanities Council (2023)
- Shakespeare Association of America Next Generation Plenary (2022)
- Villa I Tatti Graduate Fellowship (2020-21)
- Harvard Horizons Scholar (2020)