Dr. Lisa M. Barksdale-Shaw, a Visiting Assistant Professor in James Madison College’s Humanities Culture and Writing at Michigan State University, has just accepted a tenure-stream position as Assistant Professor, Department of English, Arizona State University.  Lisa completed her law degree at the University of Michigan Law School and her doctoral degree from Michigan State University in 2016. Her committee included Professors Jyotsna G. Singh (Dir), Tamar Boyadjian, Stephen Arch, and Edward Watts.

In 2016, Professor Barksdale-Shaw worked in-residence on a post-doctoral fellowship as the Erikson Scholar for the Erikson Institute for Education and Research at the Austen Riggs Center in Massachusetts. She has published in Routledge’s “Material Readings in Early Modern Culture” series (2018), The Renaissance Quarterly (2019), and the journal, Shakespeare in Southern Africa (2020). Her scholarly specialization examines the narrative of justice, by combining several disciplines, including law, literature, and medicine. In her work, she foregrounds evidence and criminology, litigation practices and procedure, trial advocacy, material culture, stage properties and performance, racial trauma, ethics, state actors, and the history of law.  Currently, she has a several works in a progress including monographs on law and literature and racial trauma.