Emily Seitz

• MA English Literature - Simon Fraser University
• BA (Hons.) English Honours: Creative Writing – University of the Fraser Valley

I graduated in 2015 from the University of the Fraser Valley with a Bachelor of Arts, English Honours: Creative Writing degree. In 2016, I completed a Master’s degree in English Literature at Simon Fraser University, where I focused on David Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee in my capstone, “Blest genius of the isle”: Garrick, Nature, Divinity, and the Bard.” I am currently a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Birmingham.

My thesis, Cultivating the Bard: The Construction of Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, aligns two major foci of research on the eighteenth century in order to present a new disciplinary understanding of how philosophical ideals of nature impacted the eighteenth-century Shakespeare adaptations: the nationalist concern in creating the Bard and the cultivation of nature to show human dominance of the earth. Through these two research foci, my dissertation interrogates Shakespeare’s identity as the national poet and “the poet of nature.” Ideals of nationalism and nature, I posit, worked in tandem to cultivate Shakespeare into the Bard.

I have spoken about hybridity in children’s literature at several conferences and a guest lecture.