Janet Ann Adelman (January 28, 1941 – April 6, 2010) was a Shakespearean scholar, a literary critic, and professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Adelman’s most prominent works include book-length critiques of William Shakespeare’s plays presenting new psychoanalytic and feminist readings of Antony and Cleopatra and The Merchant of Venice in "The Common Liar: An Essay on 'Antony & Cleopatra'" (1973) and Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in 'The Merchant of Venice''' (2008), respectively. Adelman authored another book, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest, (1992) that discusses maternal characters over many of Shakespeare’s works. Education and family Adelman was born in Mt. Kisco, New York, on January 28, 1941. She earned a B.A. degree in English and graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1962. She then attended St Hugh's College, Oxford in England the following year supported by a Fulbright Fellowship. She received a master's degree in English from Yale University in 1966 and a Ph.D. in English from Yale three years later in 1969. "Her husband of 33 years, Robert Osserman, said Adelman loved the theater, nature, bird watching and taking walks in nearby Tilden Regional Park." Her two sons, Brian Osserman and Stephen Osserman live in Woodland, CA and Portland, OR, respectively. Janet's brother Howard Adelman also lives in Bethel, CN. Career, personal life, and selected works Adelman joined the University of California, Berkeley's English department as an acting assistant professor in 1968 (also one of the first women to join the department faculty), earned tenure in 1972, and became a full professor in 1981. She eventually served as the department's chair from 1999 to 2002 and retired in 2007. In the early 1970s, Adelman taught a popular "Shakespeare for non-majors" undergraduate course at U.C. Berkeley. Her professional statement, though no longer posted on the UC Berkeley English Department's faculty contact page, can still be found online: "My dominant interests are in psychoanalysis, gender, and race, usually practiced somewhere in proximity to Shakespeare, although I have been planning a long essay on Toni Morrison for some time. At the moment I am writing a book about issues of conversion, race, identity, and blood as they inflect the anxiety-fraught relation of Christian to Jew in 'The Merchant of Venice' and elsewhere in the culture." And her areas of interest were also listed as: "English Renaissance Literature 1500-1660.