English Faculty Richelle Munkoff

Richelle Munkhoff

Assistant Professor of English

Norman Mayer Room 220

Telephone: 862-8171

Fax: (504) 862-8958

Richelle Munkhoff received her PhD in Early Modern Literature and Culture from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her areas of research include Shakespeare, Spenser, and the roles of women in medicine and public health in England from 1500-1850. She is currently at work on two books. Privy Places: Women and Matters of Interpretation examines the ways in which women provide essential interpretive information in matters of public concern, such as law and education, and yet are rhetorically positioned as unnecessary to the gathering of that very information. Searchers of the Dead: Women and the Bills of Mortality, 1500-1850 presents the first history of the poor women who were hired to determine cause of death in order to generate the data printed in the Bills of Mortality. Women held this essentially unchanging role from at least the early sixteenth century until the introduction of a national registry in the 1840s, yet very little has been written about them. She is on leave for 2006-07.