Natalia Khomenko

Biography

I specialize in medieval and early modern literature, Global Shakespeare, and adaptation studies. Broadly speaking, my research explores how literary and dramatic narratives are received and reimagined, and what cultural labour they might be pressed into performing. I have done work on English writers’ repurposing of the virgin martyr vita in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and now study the ideological uses of Shakespeare appropriation in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. At the moment, I am completing a book that looks at the innovative experimentation with Shakespeare’s play-texts in the first decade and a half after the October Revolution, when the Bolshevik-led cultural and political overhaul enabled a temporary suspension of investment in Shakespeare’s cultural authority. My next research project considers Shakespeare’s function as a tool of soft power in the political encounters between Russia and the West, as well as within the Soviet Empire.

Before coming to Queen’s, I have taught at several post-secondary institutions, including York University and the University of Toronto. I am currently a Fellow at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at the University of Toronto, where I work on the exoticizing cultural fantasies of Russia consumed by the early modern theatre audiences.

Selected Publications

• Macbeth in Stalin’s Russia: Allusion and Performance.” Macbeth in European Culture, edited by Juan Cerda and Paul Prescott. Bloomsbury Press, 2026, pp. 55-67.
• “Maria Andreeva, Theatre Administration, and Shakespearean Performance in Post-Revolutionary Russia.” Performing Girls and Women, Medieval to Early Modern and Beyond, edited by Deanne Williams. Amsterdam University Press, 2025, pp. 193-215.
• “Theorizing Social Reparation: Introduction to Reparative Global Shakespeare,” co-written with Alexa Alice Joubin. The Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 22, special volume on Reparative Shakespeare, 2025, pp. 1-17.
• “Feeling with Othello: The Ethical Implications of Ideological Empathy.” The Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 22, special volume on Reparative Shakespeare, 2025, pp. 148-166.
• “Shakespeare and the Slavic World.” Contemporary Readings in Global Performances of Shakespeare, edited by Alexa Alice Joubin. Bloomsbury Press, 2024, pp. 178-193.
• "The Revolution’s Bloody Hands: Macbeth in Bolshevik Russia.” Shakespeare, vol. 19, no. 2, 2023, pp. 222-245.
• “Rescuing Othello: Early Soviet Stage and Cultural Authority.” Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation, edited by Vanessa I. Corredera, L. Monique Pittman, and Geoffrey Way. Routledge, 2023, pp. 67-83.
• “Confronting the Past, Dreaming the Future: Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in Modern Performance,” co-written with Sarah Crover. Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 40, no. 3, 2022, pp. 313-327.
• “‘Cheerful, carefree, beautiful life’: The Trouble with Staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Early Soviet Theatre.” Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 40, no. 3, 2022, pp. 365-383.
• “Comrade Rutland: Anti-Stratfordian Conversations in Early Soviet Russia.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 72, nos. 1-2, 2021, pp. 104-125.
• “From Social Justice to Metaphor: The Whitening of Othello in the Russian Imagination.” Multicultural Shakespeare, vol. 23 (38), 2021, pp. 75-89.
• “The Taming of the Shrew in Soviet Russia: Ideological Dangers of Structural Instability.” The Taming of the Shrew: The State of Play, edited by Jennifer Flaherty and Heather C. Easterling. Bloomsbury Press, 2021, pp. 88-104.
• “Introduction: Shakespeare after the October Revolution.” The Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 18, special section on Soviet Shakespeare, 2020, pp. 3-17.
• “Feeling Love in Soviet Russia: The Slippery Lessons of Romeo and Juliet.” The Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 18, special section on Soviet Shakespeare, 2020, pp. 85-101.
• “The Authorizations of Torture: John Bale Writing Anne Askew.” Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300-1650, edited by John R. Decker and Mitzi Kirkland-Ives. Ashgate Publishing, 2015, pp. 117-133.
• “The Cult of Shakespeare in Soviet Russia and the Vilified Ophelia.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, vol. 9, no. 1, 2014, n.p.
• “‘Between You and Her No Comparison’: Witches, Healers, and Elizabeth I in John Lyly’s Endymion.” Early Theatre, vol. 13, no 1, 2010, pp. 37-63.