Undergraduate Program Director, St. Petersburg campus
Professor, Literature

CONTACT

Office: DAV 256
Phone: 727-873-4158
Email

• Cirriculum Vitae
• Selected Publications
• Information on her book collection Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre
• Information on her monograph Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare's Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid

BIO

Lisa S. Starks is a Shakespearean and early modern British literature expert and Associate Editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook. Her main research interests include Shakespeare adaptation, cinema, Jewish Shakespeares, and Levinas; sexuality, violence, and trauma in Shakespeare and other Renaissance drama; early modern theatre and Ovid. Starks has served in many administrative and leadership roles at USF’s St. Petersburg campus, including as Founding Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Founding Department Chair.

Starks has published widely in Shakespeare and related areas. Her book publications include a co-edited collection, The Shakespearean International Yearbook: Mixed Race Studies (with Alexa Alice Joubin and Adele Lee, Routledge, 2026); an edited collection, Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre (Edinburgh University Press, 2019); a monograph, Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid (Palgrave, 2014); and two co-edited collections (with Courtney Lehmann), Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema (Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2002) and The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory (Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2002). She is currently writing a new monograph on Levinas, Shakespeare, and Adaptation (under contract with Edinburgh University Press). This book addresses the ways in which Emmanuel Levinas’s radical ethics provides a model to explore and promote compassionate “Shakespeares” and the power of the arts. In it, Starks examines Shakespearean adaptations and appropriations on stage, screen, television, the internet, and in face-to-face or online classrooms.

Her essays have appeared in journals such as Critical Survey, Levinas Studies, Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance, Shakespeare Survey, Archiv fuer das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, Shakespearean International Yearbook, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Theatre Journal, among others; and in book collections such as Shakespeare & His Religious Afterlives (ed. Marta Cerezo, Berghahn Books, Shakespeare & Series, 2026), Shakespearean International Yearbook: Mixed Race Studies (eds. Alexa Alice Joubin, Lisa S. Starks, Adele Lee, Routledge, 2026), Slings & Arrows: Adapting Shakespeare in Theatre and Television (eds. Kailin Wright and Don Moore, 2026), Performing Shakespearean Appropriations: Essays in Honor of Christy Desmet (eds. Darlena Ciraulo, Matthew Kozusko, and Robert Sawyer. Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2022), The Jew of Malta, by Christopher Marlowe (ed. Lloyd Edward Kermode, Norton Critical Editions, W.W. Norton, 2021, rpt.), Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature (eds. John S. Garrison and Goran Stanivukovic. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021),The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (eds. Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson, Routledge, 2020), Shakespeare On Stage and Off (eds. Kenneth Graham and Alysia Kolentsis, McGuill-Queen's University Press, 2019), Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film and Performance (Marina Cano and Rosa García-Periago, 2019), Julius Caesar: A Critical Reader (ed. Andrew James Hartley, Arden/Bloomsbury, 2016), Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture (eds. Jennifer Feather and Catherine Thomas, Palgrave, 2013), Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theatre (eds. Sara Morrison and Deborah Umann, 2013), and Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays (ed. Sara Munson Deats, Routledge, 2005), as well as in several earlier edited collections and encyclopedia volumes published by scholarly presses.

Starks teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on topics such as Shakespeare; early modern to eighteenth-century British literature (especially drama and poetry); literary criticism and theory; and adaptation / cinema studies. Her courses make interconnections between literature and gender, sexuality, trauma, and mythology, as well as religious, racial, and ethnic identities. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from USF, Tampa campus, under the direction of Sara Munson Deats.