Kaara Peterson is Associate Professor of English at Miami University. Her publications include Popular Medicine, Hysterical Disease, and Social Controversy in Shakespeare’s England (2004), The Afterlife of Ophelia (ed., 2012) and Disease, Diagnosis and Cure on the Early Modern Stage (ed., 2004). She has previously been a visiting fellow at Harvard University, the Houghton Library and the Paul Mellon Centre. Her Plumer Lecture will be part of her current project about the construction of virginity in Elizabethan England, essays from which have been published in English Literary Renaissance, Studies in Philology and Renaissance Quarterly.