Catherine Reedy is a Teaching Professor of English and the Chair of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies program at Lake Forest College, where she researches and teaches on early modern English literature, neurodiversity, and gender studies. Her academic work has appeared in such journals as Early Modern Literary Studies, as well as the edited collections Doctrine and Disease in the British and Spanish Colonial World (Penn State University Press) and Historicizing the Embodied Imagination (Palgrave). Her fiction has been published at Necessary Fiction, American Literary Review, decomP magazine, and elsewhere. She is at work on a monograph on the plague in Shakespeare’s theater and a novel based on Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.

She holds a B.A. in biological psychology from Bates College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University where she studied plague, revenge, and poison in Shakespeare’s theater.