Elizabeth Pentland specializes in Renaissance literature including Shakespeare. Her research focuses on transnational literary exchanges between England and France during the period of the French civil wars. Her current project, provisionally titled Inventing the ‘French Cannibal’, traces the emergence of this satirical figure in English print literature and drama during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and considers, in particular, its relation to discourses of social and religious reform. She is also an Associate Editor of The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare (2021 – ), where she has published an entry on Mesnak, a French-language Indigenous film adaptation of Hamlet directed by the Québec-based playwright, actor, director, and filmmaker, Yves Sioui Durand. Other recent publications include “Agincourt and After — The Adversary’s Perspective,” in King Henry V: A Critical Reader (Arden Early Modern Drama Guides, 2018); “‘I cannot speak your England’: French women in King John and Henry V,” for a special issue of Early Modern Literary Studies (2017); and “Modern Retrospectives: Childhood and Education in Tom Stoppard’s Shakespearean Plays,” in Childhood, Education, and the Stage in Early Modern England, edited by Deanne Williams and Richard Preiss (Cambridge University Press, 2017). 

She regularly teaches courses in Shakespeare, contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare (and/or global Shakespeare), Early Modern political theory, and the literature of travel, and she has been nominated for both the LA&PS Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the President’s University-Wide Teaching Award.