Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2001
B.A., University of Pennsylvania, 1994

Gina Bloom joined the UC Davis English faculty in 2007. Before coming to Davis, she taught at the University of Iowa and Lawrence University. Her areas of interest include early modern English literature, especially Shakespeare and drama, gender and feminist theory, theater history and performance, and sound studies. Her first book, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, Material Texts series, 2007), won the award for best book of the year from the The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.

With a fellowship from the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS), she will spend the 2009-2010 academic year in Washington D.C. working on her current book project, a study of games and masculinity in the early modern English theater.

Selected Publications

• Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England.  University of Pennsylvania Press, Material Texts series, 2007. 
• "Words Made of Breath: Gender and Vocal Agency in King John." Shakespeare Studies 33 (2005): 125-55.
• "Localizing Disembodied Voice in Sandys' Translation of 'Narcissus and Echo.'" In Ovid and the Renaissance Body, ed. Goran Stanivukovic (Toronto University Press, 2002), 129-54.
• "'Thy Voice Squeaks': Listening for Masculinity on the Early Modern Stage." Renaissance Drama 29 (2000): 39-71.

Publication Spotlight

Voice in Motion explores the human voice as a literary, historical, and performative motif in early modern English drama and culture, where the voice was frequently represented as struggling, even failing to work. In a compelling and original argument, Gina Bloom demonstrates that early modern ideas about the efficacy of spoken communication spring from an understanding of the voice's materiality. Voices can be cracked by the bodies that produce them, scattered by winds when transmitted as breath through their acoustic environment, stopped by clogged ears meant to receive them, and displaced by echoic resonances. The early modern theater underscored the voice's volatility through the use of pubescent boy actors, whose vocal organs were especially vulnerable to malfunction.

Reading plays by Shakespeare, Marston, and their contemporaries alongside a wide range of late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century texts--including anatomy books, acoustic science treatises, Protestant sermons, music manuals, and even translations of Ovid--Bloom maintains that cultural representations and theatrical enactments of the voice as "unruly matter" undermined early modern hierarchies of gender. The uncontrollable physical voice creates anxiety for men, whose masculinity is contingent on their capacity to discipline their voices and the voices of their subordinates. By contrast, for women the voice is most effective not when it is owned and mastered but when it is relinquished to the environment beyond. There, the voice's fragile material form assumes its full destabilizing potential and becomes a surprising source of female power. Indeed, Bloom goes further to query the boundary between the production and reception of vocal sound, suggesting provocatively that it is through active listening, not just speaking, that women on and off the stage reshape their world.

Bringing together performance theory, theater history, theories of embodiment, and sound studies, this book makes a significant contribution to gender studies and feminist theory by challenging traditional conceptions of the links among voice, body, and self.