Dr Chris Laoutaris PhD, FEA, FHEA, FRSA, FRHistS

• Awarded a Birmingham Fellowship for a project on Shakespeare’s First Folio (The Shakespeare Institute) 
• Awarded a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship for the research and writing of Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe (University College London)
• PhD, ‘Shakespearean Maternities: Crises of Conception in Early Modern England’. Awarded full funding by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (University College London)
• MA English: Renaissance to Enlightenment, graduating with year’s highest Distinction. Awarded full funding by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (University College London)
• BA English, graduating as year’s Morley Medallist with the highest First Class Honours (University College London)

I pursued all my degrees at University College London where I was awarded the Morley Medal in English, the Ker Memorial Prize in English, and accorded a place on the Dean’s List for Academic Achievement. Shortly afterwards I was awarded a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship for Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe, which was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize for Biography (sponsored by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch). My first book was entitled Shakespearean Maternities: Crises of Conception in Early Modern England (Edinburgh), and I have been a contributor to two of Ashgate Press’s Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama series of books, as well as author of a survey of activist female translators and historical writers for Palgrave Macmillan’s History of British Women’s Writing: 1500-1610, which won the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Collaborative Project Award and was called ‘a landmark volume’. I am also contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio, edited by Emma Smith, among other academic publications. In addition I am the co-editor with Dr Yasmin Arshad of Women and Cultures of Portraiture in the British Literary Renaissance (Arden Shakespeare).

On joining the Shakespeare Institute, I was awarded a Birmingham Fellowship to pursue the project which became Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio, published by HarperCollins’ William Collins imprint, which secured the rights for two books in competition with several other major commercial publishers. My first poetry collection, Bleed and See (Broken Sleep Books), which includes an essay on critical disability studies and the role of the carer, was shortlisted for the Eric Gregory Poetry Awards, and my first co-edited volume of poetry is Anne-thology: Poems Representing Anne Shakespeare (Broken Sleep Books), the world’s first collection of poems devoted to Anne Shakespeare. I am currently co-editing another poetry anthology entitled 100 Shakespearian Women, to be published by Broken Sleep Books.

I am the Co-Founder and Co-Chair, with Professor Michael Dobson and Dr Rowan Mackenzie, of the Shakespeare Beyond Borders Alliance (SBBA), a Shakespeare network devoted to crossing disciplinary, national, geographical and social borders – a Shakespeare network without limits! The project includes the creation of the EQUALityShakespeare (EQUALS) initiative, Co-Chaired with Dr Yasmin Arshad. 

I teach Shakespeare and early modern drama, but my specialisms are broad and highly interdisciplinary. I particularly enjoy blending medical histories, archaeology, art history, teratology, post-humanism, gender studies, and the histories of magic and superstition with the teaching of Shakespeare. I have convened and taught numerous modules, including the Shakespeare’s Theatre MA core module, the Research Skills in Shakespeare B module, Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems, and the Shakespeare’s Bodies of Knowledge module (which explores Shakespeare’s representation of the human body from a range of disciplinary angles and approaches). I am the co-convenor and co-creator of Shakespeare’s Worlds/The World’s Shakespeares module and Teaching Shakespeare module.

As well as Shakespeare my teaching experience and interests in the early modern period include: Shakespeare’s theatres; women’s history, literatures and translations; the First Folio; revenge tragedies (Thomas Kyd and Thomas Middleton); city comedies (Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton); Elizabethan prose fiction (John Lyly and Thomas Nashe); metaphysical poetry (John Donne); Marlowe’s plays; Milton’s poetry and political writings; and a full module on Ben Jonson, covering a selection of plays, court masques, the poetry, and the Discoveries; among other subjects.

I have supervised or co-supervised subjects as diverse as Shakespeare’s military spouses; Shakespeare in applied theatre settings; Shakespeare and the body; the menopausal female body in Shakespeare; Shakespeare and Asexuality; Shakespeare and race; witchcraft and cross-cultural adaptations of Macbeth; the non-English maternal body in Shakespeare. I have also been involved in the supervision of doctoral students in the following areas: infanticide in Early Modern England; elite female self-starvers in Renaissance England; and Shakespeare and Domestic Tragedy. I would be interested in hearing from prospective doctoral students working in any areas covering my main research interests.

Find out more - our PhD Shakespeare Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Particular areas of interest include the history of the Blackfriars and Globe theatres; the Shakespeare First Folio; Renaissance anatomy and dissection; witchcraft, ritual and superstition in early modern England; Renaissance satiric utterance; early modern natural-historical enquiry; cultures of melancholy; the literature and material culture of wonder and curiosity; early modern figurations of monstrosity; funerary monuments and the Renaissance death-ritual; connections between Renaissance portraiture and literature; the uses of emblems in dramatic literature and early modern visual cultures; early modern robotics, artificial life and post-humanism; the literary and political uses of Tacitism; the circle of the Earl of Essex; Renaissance politics; Puritanism; maternity, women’s history and indomitable female figures of the Renaissance.

I particularly enjoy interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, combining techniques used in art-historical, archaeological, biographical, and medical forms of historical enquiry. My interest in England’s heritage and my methodological approach has involved me in direct on-site research at archaeological sites, castles, stately homes, museums, churches and cathedrals, grottoes and follies, auction-houses, private collections, galleries, English cultural heritage sites and other historic buildings.

I firmly believe that sound research grounded in palaeographical experience and training in the archives is a crucial means of learning about Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The cornerstone of all my publications/projects has always been contact with original manuscript and source material, and I have extensive experience of working with state papers, letters, diaries, wills, property deeds, heraldic documents, funerary itineraries, receipt books, medical treatises, epitaphic inscriptions, anatomical fugitive sheets, legal texts, privy council acts, and trial documents.