Carducci earned her B.A. in English from Colorado College in Colorado Springs and then, much to her parents' dismay, moved to northern Nevada, and dealt blackjack for eleven years. Feeling that, for her, the casinos were a dead-end street, Carducci completed the M.A. and Ph.D. programs from the University of Nevada in Reno. Her specialty is the English Renaissance with minor fields in poetry and linguistics. She has been teaching at the college level for seventeen years in Nevada, Colorado, New York, and Minnesota (where she has finally settled in as a full, tenured professor). Her publications on Shakespeare, composition, and pedagogy have appeared in such journals as Literature and Psychology, Language and Literature, and Cahiers Elisabethains.