Debora Kuller Shuger (born December 15, 1953) is a literary historian and scholar. She studies early modern, Renaissance, late 16th- and 17th century England. She writes about Tudor-Stuart literature; religious, political, and legal thought; Neo-Latin; and censorship of that period.
While in college, Shuger married Scott Shuger, who created the Today's Papers column for Slate.com.[1] Scott died in 2002.[2] They had one daughter.
Shuger is the oldest of three sisters. Her parents are Alan Kuller, retired Vice President for real estate of Caldor,[3] and Nancy Schoenbrod Kuller (deceased, 1993), a sculptor and painter.
Her latest book challenges the assumption that early modern censorship was an instrument used by governmental power to punish dissent. Shuger tries to prove that this is an anachronisticerror, and that censorship usually had demonstrably more to do with the prevention of slander than it did with the suppression of popular rights—more to do with civility than with mass mind-control.
Shuger's previous book confronted the longstanding assumption that the English church had been fully complicit with the repressive hegemonic powers of government in this period. Instead, the church was often a key haven for humane resistance to such repression, a place where ideas of social justice could sustain themselves, and as a resource for individual and collective action—to put it as what recent scholarship would deem an oxymoron, it was a benign patriarchy. Political Theologies uses Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure to show that the laws of the church and of the state interacted in ways that modern researchers have overlooked (resulting in a distorted understanding of the play as well as history) by anachronistically imposing our own categories to differentiate moral from administrative questions.