Sarah-Gray Lesley received her PhD in English from the University of Chicago in 2024. She is a scholar of early modern British Literature with a focus on gender studies and premodern critical race theory. Her current book project, Consuming Womanhood: Reproduction, Consumption, and the Formation of White Femininity in Early Modern England, reveals how early modern thinkers developed the idea of British white womanhood through a slippage between digestive and gestative acts and metaphors. This book contends that these seemingly innocuous jokes, puns, and poetic conflations were strategically deployed in service of England’s growing imperialist ambitions. On the page and stage, writers developed a paradigm by which white women were granted racial privileges through their performed or stated right to consume the products, labors, and, in fiction, even bodies of non-white persons and non-British lands. This consumerist privilege was afforded to them because their white reproductive labors were central to and protected under British settler colonialism and imperial expansion.
In addition to this project, Sarah-Gray has written articles and developed courses on the romantic-comedy, both early modern and contemporary, and on representations of fatness in Shakespearean theatre. In general, she’s interested in the relationship between literary genres and “body genres.” For example, what kinds of bodies are read as comic in the Shakespearean canon? How do early modern tragedies generate audience sympathy for the suffering of those with a specific kind of body?
She’s committed to thinking transhistorically and unearthing how early modern tropes continue to influence the media we consume (no pun intended!) today. She loves serious writing about books, movies, and plays that are often deemed unserious, including but not limited to the latest rom-com or horror film.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Falstaff’s Fat Suit.” Shakespeare Quarterly. (Forthcoming)
“Abortive Poetics and Tragedies of Reproduction on the Early Modern Stage.” Co-authored with Hannah Chambers. Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 64.1. (2026).
“‘The Mother’s Mouth’: Markets, Birthing Rooms, and White Women in Thomas Middleton’s London, 1613.” Renaissance Drama 52.1. (2024): 107-25 (9234 words)
“The Epicure in Surinam: Lucretian Reception and Skepticism in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1600-1700 43.2 (2020): 75-91.
Book Chapter
“Shakespeare and the Lucretian.” Co-authored with Ada Palmer and Elena Nicoli. The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Politics, edited by Christopher Fitter. (New York: Routledge, 2026): 107-21.
Book Review
Austerity Measures: The Poetics of Food Insecurity in Early Modern English Literature by Anders M. Greene-Crow in Modern Philology. December 2025.
Other
“The Rom-Com Renaissance and Renaissance Rom-Coms.” The Sundial. ACMRS Press. November 2024.
https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/shakespeare-race-and-the-rom-com-renaissance- ab2e24258f33