Dr. Jessica Winston

Professor, Department of English & Philosophy

Jessica Winston is Professor of English, with a specialization in Renaissance literature and Shakespeare. She teaches a wide range of courses, including Writing and Rhetoric, Introduction to Literary Analysis, British Literature Survey, Survey of Drama, and Shakespeare.

While she has a passion for teaching all of these subjects, Winston has a special interest in teaching Shakespeare with performance approaches, such as up-on-your-feet activities in class. One of her favorite classes is “Shakespeare in Performance,” where students study several Shakespeare plays and then take four-day trip to the Utah Shakespeare Festival to explore the plays on stage.

Winston’s work in that class has led to pedagogical publications. In one article, Winston explores the common, but untheorized teaching convention of requiring students to see stage production of a play. Students sometimes assume that a performance is a visual paraphrase, to be evaluated in terms of its fidelity to the text. Winston argues that students gain more from the experience when they are taught to analyze a performance as a complex event in its own right, one that brings together the text with other factors, such as traditions of interpretation, the insights of the actors, and contemporary societal concerns. 

Winston has a bachelor’s degree in English from Wellesley College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from University of California, Santa Barbara. As a postdoctoral fellow, she also taught courses in Renaissance literature at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland). She was named an ISU Master Teacher in 2007 and 2010.