Dr Ella Hawkins

• PhD on ‘The Significance of Jacobethanism in Twenty-First-Century Costume Design for Shakespeare’ (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham) – 2020
• MA in Shakespeare and Theatre (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham) – 2016
• BA in Theatre and Performance Studies (University of Warwick) - 2015

My academic career began at the University of Warwick, where I completed a degree in Theatre and Performance Studies and discovered my passion for research. I pursued my MA in Shakespeare and Theatre and my PhD in Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. My research interests have always centred on Shakespeare in performance, broadening in recent years to include costume design, dress history, material culture, and musical theatre.

I share my fascination with design by collaborating with arts and heritage organisations, and by creating edible art inspired by historical textiles, objects, and costumes. Between 2017 and 2020, I worked with the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Theatre and Performance Department on the development of a major new exhibition located on the site of The Theatre in Shoreditch. In 2017, I was a Research Advocate at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and between 2016 and 2017 I advised Royal Shakespeare Company directors on the performance histories of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. In my capacity as an artist, I have collaborated with Jane Austen’s House, the David Parr House, The MERL, Reading Museum, and Crawford Art Gallery. 

During the 2022/23 academic year, I will be convening two short courses at the Shakespeare Institute: ‘Fall in with Shakespeare’ and ‘Spring into Shakespeare’.

I will also be teaching on the undergraduate modules ‘Poetry’, ‘Reading English’, ‘Shakespeare: Elizabethan’, ‘Shakespeare: Jacobean’, and ‘Renaissance Poetry’ in the School of English, Drama and Creative Studies.

My research explores how ideas are communicated through visual elements of performance and culture. My research monograph, Shakespeare in Elizabethan Costume: ‘Period Dress’ in Twenty-First-Century Performance (Bloomsbury, 2022), examines how early modern garments are recycled and reimagined in contemporary costume design for Shakespeare. The book deconstructs the ideas, assumptions, and desires that cluster around the clothing of the early modern period, and demonstrates how these associations have been manipulated by theatre practitioners to mould the meanings of Shakespeare’s plays. 

To establish how individual costumes interact with broader cultural narratives, I use an interdisciplinary approach to research. My work combines practical knowledge of costume construction processes with original interview material, textual analysis, historical evidence, and critical frameworks drawn from various fields (such as theories of experimental archaeology, cultural tourism, fairy tale, and hauntology). I am interested in the minutiae of modern design – how seams are sewn, which fabrics are used – as well as the widespread movements that have produced our modern relationship with Shakespeare. 

Beyond my monograph, I have published on Paul Tazewell’s costume design for the musical Hamilton and on the subject of seventeenth-century festival books.