Simone Chess (she/her)

Simone Chess is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at Wayne State University in Detroit. She is the author of Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations (Routledge, 2016) and coeditor, with Colby Gordon and Will Fisher, of a special issue on “Early Modern Trans Studies” for the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. Chess is currently working on two new book projects, one on Shakespeare and trans culture for the Routledge “Spotlight on Shakespeare” series and another focused on early modern disability, queerness, and adaptive technologies.

Lindsey Row-Heyveld (she/her)

Lindsey Row-Heyveld is Associate Professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. She is the author of Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama (Palgrave, 2018). She has published research on early modern disability and performance in Early Theater, Disability Studies Quarterly, and Allegorica, as well as the collections Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (2013), Object Oriented Environs (2016), and Performing Disability in Early Modern England (2020).

L. Bellee Jones-Pierce (she/her)

L. Bellee Jones-Pierce is Assistant Professor of English at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana. Her book project, Able Verse, suggests the English lyric is shaped by conceptions of disability as they come to metaphor in social and poetic discourse as well as the physical facts of disability itself. Her work inflects a historical formalist approach with tools and perspectives from disability studies and builds its arguments upon the vibrant early modern discourses of framing, measurement, quantification, medicine, anatomy, optics, and poetics. She is the managing coordinator of Premodern Disability, a resource aggregator for those who study disability in the medieval and early modern periods.