About

Madison R. Wolfert is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Bates College. Prof. Wolfert’s research expertise includes early modern English literature, early modern political theory, trans studies, and critical race studies. Wolfert’s book project, The Use of Sex: Literature and Empire Before Cisness, examines representations of gender and racial difference in seventeenth-century transatlantic literatures and intellectual histories. In the wake of recent right-wing attempts to frame trans life as an inherent threat to the state, this project reads colonial archives, transatlantic literatures, and transmissions of the Adam and Eve story as sites for the regulation of sex difference and sex change before the linguistic creation of “cis” and “trans.” The Use of Sex brings major authors such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Locke into conversation with writers who have receded from modern attention to argue that a racialized hermeneutics of sex difference is central to literary representations of Atlantic colonialism and imperial ideology.

Prof. Wolfert was recently awarded the Laura McAllister Dissertation Prize in Early Trans Studies and was previously the recipient of a Fulbright Grant for English Teaching Assistantship in Germany.

At Bates, Prof. Wolfert teaches courses on early modern literature, including Shakespeare.

I am excited to work with students who are interested in early modern literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies, trans studies, and science fiction!