Elizabeth Mathie specializes in early modern English literature, with a particular emphasis on drama. Her current work focuses on representations of training (of both animals and humans) in early modern England, especially in instructional manuals and on the stage. She has interests in early modern English drama and poetry, contemporaneous prescriptive literature, humanist pedagogy, early English colonialism, and animal studies. Her current book project, Early Modern English Drama and the Reinvention of Mastery, contends that rhetorics of training – and, speci cally, the conditions under which prescriptive authors advise masters to use love and mutuality rather than force to secure the obedience of their subordinates – are central to a complete understanding of the nuances of power and its operations in early modern England. Before beginning as a postdoctoral fellow in the Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellows, she received her PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan.