Qualifications

MA (Hons), University of Edinburgh.
MA, University of Warwick.
PhD., University of Warwick

Research Interests

I work on English and European Renaissance drama, focusing on gender in the writing and performance of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. I am also an editor of Renaissance plays,
and am currently working on plays by John Fletcher and by William Shakespeare. I share these research interests in lectures for Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and in collaboration with the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. I am also a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and have held research fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library Washington DC and the Huntington Library, California.

Much of my work deal with the neglected but growing field of Renaissance women’s performance. I’m interested in the interpretation of performance as a means of reading early modern dramatic texts, and my first book (Women on the Renaissance Stage, MUP, 2002) explores Anna of Denmark’s masquing via literature, performance, dance, costume, scenery, portraiture and architecture. I’ve also edited a collection of essays (Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), which broadens this interest out to consider both women’s performance and authorship within the courts of the Stuart queens consort, Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria. My interest in women’s performance is ongoing: my article (‘When is a woman not a woman? Or, fantasies of Jacobean performance’, Modern Philology, 105:3 2008) explores
the ways in which masque texts record the impact of the staged female body via a form of textual transvestism and I am currently editing a volume from 'The Queen's House Conference, 2010: Renaissance Women's Performance and the Dramatic Canon' which I organised with the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, in July 2010. (Please see http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/researchcentres/renaissance/a/>ctress/index.html)..

I’m also interested in early modern cultural geographies, both within the ‘British Isles’ and in European colonialism in the ‘East’. I’m currently editing John Fletcher’s play, The Island Princess, for Arden Early Modern Drama and have written chapters on the interactions between the cultures of early modern England, Ireland and Scotland in The Oxford Short History of the ‘British Isles’: The Seventeenth Century and Theatre Crossing Borders: Transnational and Transcultural Exchange in Early Modern Drama (Ashgate 2008). As part of this work, I’m a member of the steering group for the international collaborative theatre research group based at New York University, Theatre Without Borders (see http://www.nyu.edu/projects/theaterwithoutborders/)

I am also a co-editor of the theoretical anthology, Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader (OUP, 2005). This collection introduces students to recent developments in critical thinking. Current projects include editing 'Othello' for the Norton Complete Shakespeare (3rd edition) and I have recently co-edited (with Lucy Munro, Keele University) a special issue of 'Shakespeare' which explores the interconnections between Shakespeare and Fletcher.

I would be very interested in hearing from prospective doctoral students. I am currently co-supervising an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award student, with Dr. Richard Johns of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. The student is undertaking doctoral work on the Queen's House at Greenwich as a site of queenship.

Research Projects Undertaken

Research Expertise
Early modern literature and theatre; Shakespeare, Fletcher, Jonson; gender and performance studies; women and gender in the English and European Renaissance (especially women on the Renaissance stage); the history of the Stuart queens' courts; the court masque; women on the Renaissance stage; theatre history.

Supervision
I have supervised successful doctorates on Shakespeare on film, the children's playing companies of early modern London, early modern women's writing in Ireland, and the dance history of the Stuart masque.

I would be interested in supervising projects on Renaissance literature and theatre broadly defined. Such projects might be interdiscplinary or based primarily in early modern literature.

Teaching Interests

Before coming to Roehampton, I taught at the University of Warwick, the University of Birmingham, the University of Wales Bangor and Queen's University Belfast. I was visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at El Paso.

On the Roehampton undergraduate curriculum, I teach specialist modules on The Shakespearean Stage and Staging Gender and a second-year survey module on Early Modern Literature.