Baruch Professor Allison Deutermann Wins CUNY Research Award

Baruch Professor Allison Deutermann Wins CUNY Research Award

April 1, 2026

The City University of New York bestowed its newly created 2025 Jerome Krase & Sandi Cooper Awards to recognize associate professors across all campuses for their outstanding research in the humanities or sciences, and Baruch College's Allison Deutermann was among 10 winning recipients.

Professor Deutermann came to Baruch in 2009 and currently serves as deputy chair of the English Department at the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences.

She is a nationally recognized scholar of Shakespeare, British literature, and early modern drama. Deutermann has authored or co-edited three books and has contributed to prestigious academic journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, and English Literary Renaissance. In addition, she has presented at numerous conferences, including Shakespeare Association of America and Renaissance Society of America.

During her tenure at Baruch, Deutermann has received a Whiting Foundation Award for Outstanding Teaching, and research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Huntington Library Mayer Fellowship.

To learn more, we asked her five questions.

What is the focus of your award-winning research?

We are used to thinking of celebrity as something strictly contemporary, a modern phenomenon. But celebrity does not come out of nowhere. I am interested in the kinds of popular, public attention that exist before the twentieth century.

One of the places I think we can see such forms of mass attention developing is in the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. My book, Celebrity Characters, argues that dramatic characters became public people-known, recognizable, talked about-in ways that were fundamentally new.

What inspired you to pursue this topic?

It came from a class discussion after finishing Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, which is a play about a world-destroying conqueror that was an absolute blockbuster of a hit in sixteenth-century London. The conversation landed on the question of whether Tamburlaine himself was thrilling or terrifying, inspiring or apocalyptic.

One student said that Tamburlaine reminded him of LeBron James: because love or hate him, you had to have an opinion about him since everybody knows who he is.

This comment got me thinking about how characters could function as celebrities-well-known figures you could talk about, argue about, but above all assume other people would also know and be able to think and talk about with you.

What have you learned working in this field?

Two big ideas: theater happens in the moment, and theater does things, it matters. I think too often we approach literature-or really any cultural artifact-as a mirror that reflects culture rather than as an active, shaping force within it.

How do you bring your research into the classroom?

This is an easy one! We do the work together, all the time. I like thinking out loud with my students in class about the plays we read and trying things out together in the classroom. We perform short pieces of scenes in different ways to get a sense of how choices of staging-how you move, how you use your voice-affect the meaning of the scripted language.

What projects are you currently working on?

I am interested in what I call "formal atmospherics"-how dramatic forms are experienced in performance. A history play does not just differ in structure from a comedy; it creates its own mood and emotional texture on stage. Those qualities are just as important to defining a genre as whether a play ends in marriage.

Learn more: Read a profile of Professor Deutermann.

Explore: Weissman School of Arts and Sciences and its degree programs.