Revels Office

Initially set up in 2020 as a quiet Padlet conversation between Anouska Lester and Sierra Carter, the Revels Office quickly became a lifeline during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Since then, the Revels Office has grown into a virtual academic network for early modern PhD students and Early Career Researchers from different institutions and countries. We meet online as a group each month. Our aim at the Revels Office is to bring early modernists together to create a supportive and friendly space to share ideas and resources, to answer each other’s questions and give advice, to host guest speakers, to try out new work, and most importantly of all, to meet each other!

As we all know, PhDs and early-career academia can be lonely. There are surprisingly few opportunities for PhD students and Early Career Researchers to regularly interact with academics outside of their own institution except for at conferences, which can can be very overwhelming and isolating when they’re full of new people!

One of our primary goals here at the Revels Office is to help you get to know your colleagues to ease the social pressures of conferences and other academic settings.

New members are always welcome! You can view our current members here. If you’d like to join, sign up to our mailing list here.

The Revels Office website is supported by generous funding from the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York.

The Revels Office held its first conference with the Society of Antiquaries of London on 13 June 2025. The conference showcased the research of early career scholars working on the intersections between text, materiality, and performance, both in and beyond the commercial theatres in Great Britain and Ireland in the long early modern period (1500-1800).

Our keynote speaker was Professor Catherine Richardson FSA (University of East Anglia).

You can view the full programme here.

The conference organisers were Dr Juliana Beykirch, Dr Bethan Davies, Mirjam Haas, Maria Maciejewska, and Dr Gina Walter.

This conference was generously supported by the Society of Antiquaries of London, Bibliographical Society, Society for Renaissance Studies, Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies (University of York), and British Shakespeare Association

For updates on Revels Office events please sign up to our mailing list.

Every month we meet online as a group via Google Meet. We have lots of different types of sessions, outlined below. To check out our past meetings, click here. 

Bring-A-Problem Sessions, where we talk about issues we’re having with our work and try to help each other out. 

Thesis Lab Sessions, where we break down the thesis-writing process into different areas, eg. Introductions, Body Paragraphs, Bibliography, Planning etc. We share our experiences and approaches and ask questions. 

Reading Group Sessions, where members lead a reading session on a primary or secondary text they’ve selected. You can find out more about our previous sessions here. 

Guest Speaker sessions, where (you guessed it!) we host guest speakers. These speakers sometimes talk to us about their own work, sometimes deliver workshops, sometimes talk to us about aspects of Personal and Professional Development. We’ve been lucky enough to talk to Dr Nicole Sheriko (Yale University) about careers and fellowships, Dr Andy Kesson (University of Roehampton) about A Bit Lit and Box Office Bears, Professor David McInnis (University of Melbourne) about the Lost Plays Database and his book Shakespeare and Lost Plays, and Dr Sophie Duncan (University of Oxford) about Shakespeare’s Props: Memory and Cognition.

We also love to have member-led sessions! If you’ve got a workshop you’d like to run with the group or a text that you’re particularly passionate about, get in touch with Izzi, Juliana and Maria at revelsoffice@gmail.com and tell us what you’d like to do. 

All PGR or ECR early modernists are welcome to join our meetings! If you’d like to become a Revels Office member and receive our emails, then sign up to our mailing list here.

If you’re a PhD student, a PGR or an ECR Early Modernist and you’d like to join us, then you can sign up to our mailing list here. You’ll receive an email every month with an outline of what our session is going to be, as well as an invite link to our Google Meet session. We’d absolutely love to have you!

If you’d like to have a member profile that appears on our Members List, then get in touch with Izzi at isobel.strevens@bristol.ac.uk with a profile picture and a c.100 word bio.

You can also join our WhatsApp group, where we chat more informally outside of sessions! Just drop Izzi an email (above) with your phone number.

You can also follow us on social media! We’re @revelsoffice on Instagram, and @revelsoffice.bsky.social on BlueSky.

Click here for a list of our existing members, historic members, and founders.

The Revels Office welcomes new members – if you’re a PGR or ECR Early Modernist, find out how to join us here!