Happy season finale y'all!!
Today we have an unbelievably special episode for you. We were lucky enough to get the chance to interview Caroline Bicks and Michelle Ephraim -- two badasses in the world of Shakespeare and academia. Caroline and Michelle have been dream guests of ours since the podcast began -- we are both massive fans of their book Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas If you don't have a copy already -- then what have you been doing?!? You may even recognize some of the cocktails from our recommended drinks for older episodes.
Caroline Bicks is the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. She specializes in Shakespeare, gender studies and the history of science. Her book on the brains of adolescent girls in Shakespeare’s world has just been published. Her first-person essays have been featured in the Modern Love column of the New York Times, on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and in the show and book Afterbirth: Stories You Won’t Read in a Parenting Magazine. She and Michelle love to write funny pieces for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency where they pretend to be Shakespeare characters doing things like going on craigslist, writing letters to Santa Claus, and cursing you for your humble brag posts about your children.
Michelle Ephraim is Associate Professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She's published a lot of academic things on Jews, women (and Jewish women!) in early modern English literature. Her humor and memoir essays have appeared in places like The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lilith, Tikkun, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Cleaver Magazine. She and Caroline Bicks are the co-authors of Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas (Penguin, 2015). Her book-length memoir about family tragedy and her life with Shakespeare is in the works.
You can learn more about what Michelle is up to here: www.michelleephraim.com or find her on Twitter @ProfessorMKE and @EverydayShakes
You can learn more about what Caroline is up to here: https://faculty.umaine.edu/carolinebicks/