Liesl Jensen

BA Acting International (Hons), East 15 Acting School, the University of Essex (2018)

Certificate in Early Modern English Palaeography, University of Warwick (2024). 

I am a scholar of gender and sexuality in the early modern period, specializing in asexuality studies. My work is interdisciplinary, and other research interests of mine include medical history, disability studies, and queer editorial methods. My undergraduate training is as an actor, and I have performed Shakespeare around the world, including for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and the Prague Shakespeare Company. I am the founder of the Guild of Queer Early Modernists, an organization dedicated to supporting and promoting queer scholars and scholarship in early modern studies.   

Asexuality in Early Modern Literature and Culture

My doctoral research examines how early modern literature and culture thought about the refusal of sex and the set of ideas we now call asexuality. I am particularly interested in nuancing negative relations to asexuality. My work spans genres and contexts from Narcissus as a figure for asexuality, to medical discourses about sexual refusal and asexual reproduction, to poetry as a substitute for biological reproduction, to how asexuality might be performed on stage. I draw on queer theoretical and performance studies approaches to increase the historical and theoretical grounding of both asexuality and asexuality studies.

PUBLICATIONS

Forthcoming, Performance Review, ‘Arden of Faversham at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’, Shakespeare Bulletin.

INVITED SPEAKER

2025 - The Co-Construction of Chastity and Whiteness in Othello - lecture, Southern Oregon University

2024 - The Starry Welkin: An Evening of Shakespeare and the Stars – public talk at the Museum of Flight, Seattle, Washington.

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

2025 - 'All in war with time for love of you,: Grief, Asexuality, and Futurity in Shakespeare's Sonnets, Shakespeare Association of America, Boston, USA.

2024 - 'How Is Asexuality Pathologized in Early Modern Humoral Theory?', Sixteenth Century Society Conference, Toronto, Canada.

2024 - ‘“Maiden Pride”: Pride, Self-love and Narcissus as Indicators of Early Modern Asexuality’, The British Graduate Shakespeare Conference.

2024 - ‘Returning to Lack in Theorising Asexuality’, ROLES Sexuality and Gender Conference, University of Birmingham.