Juliana Beykirch
Revels Officer (2022- )
Conference Committee (2024-2025)
Juliana has just submitted her PhD thesis, entitled ‘Monstrosity and Performance on the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Stage’, at Newcastle University. Her thesis examines performances of ‘monstrosity’ in diverse dramatic forms, ranging from 1630s court masques to the experimental theatre staged around the 1737 Licensing Act. She is particularly interested in stage ‘monsters’ and the extraordinarily embodied performers portraying them.
Sierra Carter
Co-Founder
Sierra completed their PhD with the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Drawing on a survey of 500 extant playbooks, their thesis—’Epistolary Culture and Early Modern English Drama, ca. 1550-1642’—examines how manuscript, print, and performance provided imaginative mediums for depicting everyday letter-writing practices while responding to and shaping England’s burgeoning market for epistolary literature. Currently, they are writing about typography, quotation marks, and Interregnum letter-writing manuals.
Bethan Davies
Founding Member
Revels Officer (2023- )
Conference Committee (2024-2025)
Bethan is an Associate Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Roehampton. Her research looks at the global and domestic intersections between sugar and femininity in English drama and culture. She has worked with The National Archives, BBC Sounds, and Quarto Publishing on education and outreach projects related to her research.
AJ Goga
Aurora Jonathan Goga is a PGR at University of Surrey who is researching early modern genderqueer spirits in demonology, poetry, and philosophy. They did their masters about Ariel from The Tempest as a nonbinary figure in text and on stage at University of Bergen in Norway. They bench press and tell bad puns to practise lifting their spirits.
Mirjam Haas
Founding Member
Revels Officer (2023- )
Conference Committee (2024-2025)
Mirjam is a PhD student, researching and teaching at Mainz University. She spends most of her time listening to podcasts, audiobooks and radio plays and somehow that turned into her doing a PhD on sound in early modern drama. Other things she’s interested in are literary linguistics and children’s literature (see www.caughtinthebrambles.net).
Rachel Hare
Founding Member
Rachel is a SWW DTP PhD student at the University of Bristol. Her research surveys examples of fainting, feeling faint, or talking about fainting in early modern drama. She is particularly interested in conflicted interpretations of embodied gestures and the ways these conflicts expose and interrogate prevalent anxieties about gender, performance, perception, and emotion.
Anna Hegland
Founding Member
Anna completed her PhD at the University of Kent’s Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies in 2022. Her research centers on violent language in performance, and she uses both textual analysis and practice as research methods to explore the intersections of rhetoric and embodied performance in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English tragedies. She co-edited with Sam Jermy and Will Green The Theatrical Legacy of Thomas Middleton, 1624-2024, published by Routledge in 2024. Anna is currently the director of an undergraduate Writing Center and Peer Tutoring program and teaches in the general education program at her institution. If you ask nicely, Anna will enthusiastically share photos of her cat, Snug.
Lucy Holehouse
Founding Member
Lucy is an Midlands4Cities AHRC-funded PhD student at the Shakespeare Institute, researching the performance of disguise by the King’s Men from 1603 to 1630. She is particularly interested in repertory studies, costuming and cosmetics, and the works of John Fletcher. She is also currently a researcher on The King’s Women project, working on the social networks of the Burbage family and Nicholas Tooley.
Meryl Faiers
Meryl completed a PhD at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, working on commercial aspects of the professional London theatre industry during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. She arrived at the Shakespeare Institute following a career as a producer/general manager of commercial theatre, mostly in the West End of London and Australia. Her research to date has focused on playhouse ownership, and operational and financial practice, through studies of the lives of two of her Early Modern predecessors, Philip Henslowe and John Heminges. She is also a member of The King’s Women Project exploring the lives and socio-familial networks of the women who were connected to Shakespeare’s acting company.
Lily Freeman-Jones
Founding Member
Revels Officer (2022-2023)
Lily is a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London, funded by a Principal’s Studentship. Her work focusses on human and animal skin in early modern drama (1576-1642) and is supervised by Prof. Warren Boutcher at QMUL and by Prof. Evelyn Welch, PI for the Wellcome-funded Renaissance Skin project at King’s College London. Her other research interests include sensory history, medical humanities, ecocriticism, medieval miscellanies, and contemporary poetry.
Kate Foy
Founding Member
Kate is a PhD candidate at Durham University. Her thesis examines the female voice in tragic drama of the period 1603-1642. She has a particular interest in the use of the performative female voice as deployed by dramatists to explore theological and political controversies, and challenges to the status quo. Her project includes works from a range of playwrights across the period such as Thomas Middleton, Elizabeth Cary, John Ford, and James Shirley.
Her research considers the ways in which these writers use female characterisation to question the relationships between court, church, and state. Across these tragedies, she draws on the messages and methods of these early Stuart dramatists and consider the ways in which they serve to map female characters’ vocal evolutions.
LiESL JENSEN
Liesl Jensen (she/her) is a PhD Candidate at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute researching asexuality in early modern English literature and culture. She is the founder of the Guild of Queer Early Modernists, an organization dedicated to supporting and promoting queer scholars and scholars of queerness in early modern studies. Her work is interdisciplinary, and other research interests of hers are medical history, disability studies, queer editorial methods and textual studies. She has performance reviews forthcoming in multiple journals, has spoken about Shakespeare and cosmology at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, and presented her work internationally at conferences such as the Sixteenth Century Society and the Shakespeare Association of America.
Sam Jermy
Founding Member
Sam completed their PhD in the School of English at the University of Leeds. His doctoral research project – ‘Thomas Middleton, Masculinities, Embodiment’ – explores the ways in which Middleton’s writing represents and engages with masculinities that inhere in those spaces and encounters between the body and the world. Sam maintains an interest in all things bodily, dramatic, and material. They have also worked on a public-facing research project with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation on a series of lectures delivered by Anthony Burgess in 1973 on Shakespeare’s life and work. They are currently editing a forthcomign book The Theatrical Legacy of Thomas Middleton, 1624-2024 alongside Dr William Green and Dr Anna Helgand, due to be published by Routledge in 2024.
Oliver Lewis
Founding Member
Oliver is a PhD student funded by the Engendering the Stage project (Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant) at the University of Roehampton. His doctoral research project – ‘Porous Masculinities: Unstable Surfaces, Fluid Identities and Early Modern Embodiment’ – explores the ways in which the spectre of immoderate and subversive forms of masculinity haunt early modern performance. He is particularly interested in the geo-liminality of representations of gender in the period and locating traces of transnational or ‘touring’ masculine presence in early modern performance cultures.
Anouska Lester
Co-Founder
Anouska is an Honorary Research Associate with the University of York. Her doctorate with the University of Roehampton examined the ephemerality of early modern props, costumes, and documents, and her current research explores material culture and histories of collecting. She works with the Society of Antiquaries of London, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and Ashmolean Museum. She is co-editing Marlowe and Nashe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage for Oxford University Press with Martin Wiggins and her first monograph, Lost Texts and Performance Palaeontology, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.
Maria Maciejewska
Revels Officer (2023- )
Conference Committee (2024-2025)
Maria is a PhD student at the University of Innsbruck. Her thesis is a critical edition of an early-modern Jesuit play on Japan. Maria was a researcher at the LBI for Neo-Latin Studies in Innsbruck where she worked on the joint Austrian-Japanese project “Japan on the Jesuit Stage” funded by FWF and the JSPS. Thanks to Marietta Blau-Grant from OeAD, she conducted a year-long query in Rome, where she worked in ARSI and Peter-Hans Kolvenbach Library. She is interested in special collection librarianship (manuscripts) and archival studies.
Evelyn Reidy
Evelyn Reidy (she/hers) recently completed her PhD at the University of Roehampton and Shakespeare’s Globe, funded by a AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award. Her creative-critical research project focused on female and laboring class performers in non-commercial drama and their use of festive performance-as-protest in the early seventeenth century. This research is the basis for an original play titled Very Small Trouble, which tells the story of a group of performers in Wells, Somerset and their controversial Midsummer performances of 1607. She has published performance reviews in Shakespeare Bulletin, blogs with Shakespeare’s Globe, and is currently preparing a journal article for the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies. Her first play Ophelia in Space received a developmental workshop production with The Cliff Dwellers (Chicago); her next play, Sky Pale Green, was longlisted for the Masterclass Pitch Your Play Contest in 2022.
Sophia Richardson
Founding Member
Currently completing her PhD in Early Modern English literature at Yale University, Sophia explores how diverse material surfaces (glass, paint, fabric, skin) furnish early modern writers with a figurative vocabulary for their texts. Broader interests include the histories of medicine, fashion, and materiality. She teaches first-year undergraduate composition and serves as a writing fellow in the Graduate Writing Lab at Yale, as well as co-runs the Online Olio webinar series hosted by DigitalCavendish. She is currently deep into early modern cosmetics research, and while she does not advocate using lead-based cosmetics at home, please let her know if you’d like to get together for some egg-white or almond-paste facials.
Ellen roberts
Founding Member
Ellen Roberts recently submitted her Linguistics PhD at Lancaster University. Her PhD thesis considered the linguistic nature of genre variation in early modern English dramatic texts. More broadly, she is interested in how computational methodologies can be applied to texts (especially literary and historical). In particular, her research focuses on the robustness/replicability of these digital methods, how these methodologies may aid our understanding of how language varies in texts, and how the methods may be implemented across different software.
Emily Smith
Founding Member
Revels Officer (2022-2023)
Emily Smith is a postdoctoral assistant at the University of Geneva, under the supervision of Lukas Erne. Although primarily interested in early modern theatre, she is usually found interloping into disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive studies, and digital humanities. Her mildly humorous choose-your-own-adventure-stories and teaching tools can be found at shakespeerie.itch.io.
Gina Walter
Founding Member
Revels Officer (2022-2023)
Conference Committee (2024-2025)
Gina is a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol, funded by the South West & Wales DTP. Her research focusses on representations of death and grief in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, specifically how material objects (e.g. clothing, effigies, monuments, and prop body parts) are used to stage and understand these states of being. She also teaches early modern literature as a graduate teacher, and has collaborated on public theatre productions including a short play based on Shakespeare’s sonnets for Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory.
Revels Office 