Laura Kolb is an associate professor of English at Baruch College specializing in early modern literature.
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Known as the “German Princess,” Mary Carleton was a notorious 17th-century impostor whose publicized life of bigamy and deception became a foundational influence on the English novel and the female grifter archetype.
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Laura Kolb is an associate professor at Baruch College, where she has taught since 2014. A specialist in early modern literature, her courses focus on Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and women in literature. She is the author of Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2021), a study of the rhetorical and social impact of England’s early credit economy.
Kolb’s research examines gender, deception, and social performance in Renaissance comedy. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including Shakespeare Studies, Renaissance Drama, and the Sidney Journal. She also teaches in Baruch’s Great Works program. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago.External
Feminine Performance in the Taming of the Shrew
Final Speech and Missing Soliloquy
Renaissance Drama | September | 2022
In this article, Dr. Laura Kolb examines the dramatic significance of Katherine’s lack of a soliloquy, arguing that this silence forces the audience to interpret her character solely through outward social performance. By focusing on the play’s final controversial speech, Kolb suggests that Katherine’s apparent submission may actually be a sophisticated form of “social acting” rather than a genuine change of heart. Ultimately, the piece positions Katherine as a strategic rhetorician who learns to master the gendered expectations of her world, using the language of obedience as a tactical mask to navigate a restrictive patriarchal environment.
Winner of the SAA Innovative Article Award.
“The Very Modern Anger of Shakespeare’s Women”
Electric Literature | February | 2019
In this essay, Laura Kolb argues that the rage expressed by Shakespearean women—such as Paulina in The Winter’s Tale or Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing—is a vital, disruptive force that transcends its early modern context to mirror contemporary feminist frustrations. Rather than dismissing this anger as “madness” or a mere character flaw, Kolb positions it as a sophisticated rhetorical tool and a form of social resistance against patriarchal constraints. By linking these 400-year-old outbursts to the modern “unbecoming” anger of the #MeToo era, she demonstrates how Shakespeare captured the enduring tension between female agency and the systemic attempts to silence it.
John Kay’s Notebook
Folger Shakespeare Library | April | 2018
In this piece, Dr. Laura Kolb examines the 17th-century commonplace book of John Kay to reveal how early modern individuals used meticulous record-keeping to navigate their social and financial worlds. By analyzing Kay’s dense lists of expenses, borrowed books, and personal observations, Kolb demonstrates that itemization was more than just a clerical task: It was a way of “reckoning” one’s place in a credit-driven society. Ultimately, she shows that these archival fragments offer a rare, intimate glimpse into how ordinary people structured their daily lives and personal identities through the act of gathering and organizing information.
Reckoning and Reputation in Othello
Shakespeare Studies | 2016
This article offers an analysis of Shakespeare’s Othello alongside arithmetic textbooks for merchants and soldiers, notioning how the play dramatizes a problem that also haunts the pages of these math books. That is, the problem of calculating the value of persons in a society where new forms of commercial credit were unsettling traditional notions of worth grounded in status, military prowess and sexual purity. Othello’s loss of faith in his wife plus the disintegration of his sense of self both depend on Iago’s manipulation of two competing models of reputation: one based on martial valor and sexual purity (reputation as honor) and one associated with buying, selling borrowing and lending (reputation as credit). In order to have Desdemona “undo her credit with the Moor,” Iago teaches Othello that reputation is extrinsically constructed, rhetorically grounded, and easily inflated or devalued by means of words. Shakespeare associates Iago with a historically particular, pessimistic view of commercial credit. As an alternative to Iago’s skepticism and to Othello’s more attractive but equally destructive idealism, Othello offers glimpses of a heterogeneous mercantile world where mutual enterprise and cross-cultural encounter produce a mixed, flexible, and sustainable version of social value.
Electric Literature | April | 2024
In this poignant essay, Dr. Laura Kolb utilizes Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of The Shining as a lens to process the underlying tension and eventual eruption of violence within her own marriage. She explores how the film’s depiction of domestic space—once a sanctuary, now a site of psychological and physical threat—mirrored her lived reality of navigating a partner’s volatility. By deconstructing the cinematic horror of Jack Torrance, Kolb articulates the difficult process of acknowledging that a domestic life has become dangerous, ultimately illustrating how art can provide the necessary distance and vocabulary to confront personal trauma.
Publications by this author
Oxford University Press | February | 2021
In Shakespeare’s England, credit was synonymous with reputation, and reputation developed in the interplay of language, conduct, and social interpretation. As a consequence, artful language and social hermeneutics became practical, profitable skills. Since most people both used credit and extended it, the dual strategies of implication and inference of producing and reading evidence were everywhere. Like poetry or drama, credit was constructed, fashioned out of the interplay of artifice and interpretation. The rhetorical dimension of economic relations produced social fictions on a range of scales, from transitory performances facilitating local transactions, to the long-term project of maintaining creditworthiness, and to the generalized social indeterminacy that arose from the interplay of performance and interpretation.
Fictions of Credit examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented credit-driven artifice and interpretation on the early modern stage. It also analyzes a range of practical texts—including commercial arithmetic, letter-writing manuals, legal formularies, and tables of interest—which offered strategies for generating credit and managing debt. Looking at plays and practical texts together, Fictions of Credit argues that both types of writing constitute “equipment for living”: practical texts that offer concrete strategies for navigating England’s culture of credit and plays by exploring the limits of credit's dangers and possibilities. In their representations of a world re-written by debt relations, dramatic texts in particular articulate a phenomenology of economic life, showing readers what it feels like to live in credit culture—to live, that is, inside a fiction.
Educational Activities and Resources
History and Literature
This course surveys the flourishing of dramatic literature in the Renaissance, framing this dramatic development in terms of stage practices and stylistic innovations while tracking play engagement with the period’s cultural, political, economic, and religious upheavals. Readings cover a range of dramatic genres, such as revenge tragedy, city comedy, and domestic tragedy. The course may survey the work of English writers, such as Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, and Margaret Cavendish. It may also incorporate work by their continental interlocutors, including Lope de Vega, Lodovico Ariosto, and Molière.
History and Literature
This course surveys British literature from the earliest examples of the Middle Ages through the 16th and 17th centuries, considering selected works from this broad period in the context of the political, scientific, and religious changes that Britain experiences over the course of those centuries. Through this, students study some of the major contributions made by English dramatists like Shakespeare (as well as other figures) to this tradition. Students explore shifting definitions of race, gender, sexuality, and national identity, and examine literary developments and transformations in genre. From Beowulf's chivalric romance to Milton’s grand epic Paradise Lost, European literature has continued to shape and influence much of subsequent works.
History and Literature
This course offers an in-depth survey of the work of William Shakespeare, plausibly regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language. Students examine a range of Shakespeare’s works, from early plays heavily influenced by classical models through his great comedies and tragedies to his late romances. The course considers these works in the context of political, religious, and cultural issues of Shakespeare’s time and in light of particular thematic concerns recurring in Shakespeare’s work. Students analyze plays both as dramatic works intended to be performed and as literary productions that reward close reading.
History and Literature
The goal of this course is to set major literary works in their social historical, religious, economic, and political contexts, while covering a truly global range of cultures. Students compare and contrast cross-cultural conceptions of the relationship between the human and divine and examine joint human concerns as voiced through timeless works of literature. Further, students engage in a variety of communication-intensive activities designed to enhance their appreciation of literature and their awareness of the way it shapes and reflects a multicultural world. Through the writing of analytic essays and by making both formal and informal oral presentations, students improve their critical thinking and communication skills, key components of a well-rounded liberal arts education.
Literature
This course examines the presence of women in literature as both authors and subjects. How do literary works represent and challenge the traditional social roles assigned to women? How have novels, poetry, and plays shaped powerful cultural myths of femininity? The historical period(s) and genres to be covered in this course will vary, ranging from Medieval and Renaissance authors Marie de France and Shakespeare; to 18th-century writers Aphra Behn and Mary Wollstonecraft; and to Romantic, Victorian and modern authors such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Virginia Woolf.
Media by this author
Interview | March | 2023
In an interview hosted by Zalman Newfield, guest Laura Kolb discusses her book, Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare. The conversation examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented credit-driven artifice and interpretation on the early modern stage, analyzing a range of practical texts—including commercial arithmetic, letter-writing manuals, legal formularies, and tables of interest—which offered strategies for generating credit and managing debt. Looking at plays and practical texts together, Kolb examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented credit-driven artifice and interpretation on the early modern stage. She also analyzes a range of practical texts (such as commercial arithmetic, letter-writing manuals, legal formularies, and tables of interest) which offered strategies for generating credit and managing debt. Looking at plays and practical texts together, Kolb argues that both types of writing constitute “equipment for living,” practical texts that offer concrete strategies for navigating England's culture of credit and plays by exploring the limits of credit's dangers and possibilities. In their representations of a world re-written by debt relations, dramatic texts in particular articulate a phenomenology of economic life, telling us what it feels like to live in credit culture: to live, that is, inside a fiction.
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