Shakespeare Institute academic and research staff

My specialisms are in John Lyly, Shakespeare, queer studies, creative-critical practice, community-based ecology, ecocriticism, and creative writing.

I’m a Shakespeare scholar because I’m fascinated by what the continued interest in Shakespeare can reveal about the kind of beings we are. Much of my research centres on philosophical issues raised by Shakespeare’s works, and especially ontological or epistemological questions about existence and knowledge.

My current research combines my philosophical interests and my work in ...

Like his own Falstaff, Shakespeare is not only witty in himself but is the cause that wit is in others. My career as a teacher of and writer about Shakespeare’s plays and poems has been devoted not just to examining these extraordinary writings in their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century contexts, but to exploring how they have stimulated and enabled the creativity of other people, ...

I’m interested in the life in Shakespeare and other literature, and in exploring the ways in which it can inform, enhance and challenge life now.   I'm also interested in the way standard critical forms (such as the essay and approved styles of critical prose) reveal but also limit the kind of experience reading is held to be, and I'm ...

I am a Shakespeare scholar and design historian interested particularly in stage and costume design for contemporary theatrical performance.  My monograph, Shakespeare in Elizabethan Costume: ‘Period Dress’ in Twenty-First-Century Performance (Bloomsbury, 2022), explores how Elizabethan and Jacobean styles of dress have been used to reinterpret Shakespeare’s plays ...

I am a Shakespeare scholar, biographer, and historian whose specialisms include the history of Shakespeare’s theatres, women’s history, Renaissance politics, the early modern body and medicine, and the history of death, burial and commemoration. I recently signed a two-book deal with HarperCollins’ oldest imprint, William Collins, and a two-book deal with Pegasus publishers in ...

I joined the Shakespeare Institute in 2013, having been lecturing at Cambridge University for 7 years. I began my career as a professional actor, training at LAMDA and working quite extensively in theatre. Since deciding to move into academia my main research interests have been in the field of Shakespeare in performance, in particular verse speaking, adaptation and theatre history.  I ...

I’m an early modernist with particular interests in drama, music, playhouse culture, and historical sense-scapes. My most recent book is Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603-1625 (CUP, 2017; pbk edn 2018). 

I am a Shakespearean and early modernist whose principal research interests are in literary form, ranging from versification (rhyme, metre, rhythm) to verse structures (blank verse, the sonnet).

My work combines literary criticism, theatre and book history and editing from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. I’m fascinated by the theatrical contexts that brought about plays by Shakespeare and others; several of my books and articles are on the theatrical documents put together by authors and theatrical personnel in the process of writing and learning a play: actors’ ...

I am a cultural historian and literary scholar interested in the nature of emotional experience and its relation to art - in particular Shakespeare’s. My research splits into two distinct but nonetheless related strands: the cultural history of the emotions, especially sadness, and the performance of Shakespeare today.