Marie Shelton

Profile

Marie Shelton is a PhD student, Presidential Fellow, and theater director at the University of Notre Dame. She studies 19^th- and early 20^th-century narrators and the relationship between theatricality and the novel. Her dissertation researches the American novel between the years 1850 and 1901 and locates an antitheatrical prejudice at the heart of American literary realism’s representations of race, gender, and theatrical performance. She most recently assisted Dr. Sandra Gustafson in “Literatures of the Reconstruction and the Gilded Age,” an upper division course for English majors. Prior assistantships include introductory courses for both the departments of American Studies and Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT). 

She is teaching a multimedia-based writing and rhetoric course, “‘The Times They Are A-Changing:’ The Rhetoric of Protest,” through the University Writing Program in the spring and fall of 2023. 

Marie is a trained classical theater actress and applied theatre practitioner with translation proficiencies in both French and Spanish. She served as a visiting lecturer at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala City and facilitated courses on both Shakespeare and Teatro para Cambio Social. She most recently directed Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls and an absurdist reimaging of Hamlet at UC Berkeley. She hopes to write a theory of the novel one day, and maybe get a dog.