Sierra Carter
Co-Founder
Sierra is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Drawing on popular epistolary motifs, their thesis – ‘Epistolary Culture and Early Modern Drama, 1580-1642’ – surveys stage letters in extant printed drama and considers letters’ affective materiality and textuality in commercial theatres and in print. Sierra also teaches Medieval and Renaissance literature as a graduate teaching assistant, works as the administrator for Thin Ice Press, and serves as the media officer for Cabinet of Curiosities, the postgraduate forum in the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at York.
Bethan Davies
Founding Member
Bethan is a Techne PhD student at the University of Roehampton. Her research looks at the shifting metaphorical and material dimensions of sugar and sweetness in the early modern period, and how they intersect, complicate, and ratify contemporary cultural constructions of femininity as portrayed onstage.
Mirjam Haas
Founding Member
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 is currently submitting her PhD at the University of Kent’s Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Her research centers on violent language in early modern tragedies, using both textual analysis and practice as research methods, and explores the intersections of rhetoric and embodied performance in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English tragedies. When not focused on research, Anna enthusiastically shares photos of her kitten, 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.
Lily Freeman-Jones
Founding Member
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.
Sam Jermy
Founding Member
Sam recently 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.
Anouska Lester
Co-Founder
Anouska is the Before Shakespeare PhD student at the University of Roehampton. Her thesis examines the materials and props of early modern performance, such as glass, starch, snow, paper, and fruit. She is particularly interested in the ephemerality of live performance, and locating traces of that liveness in archives. Her writing-up year is funded by FfWG.
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.
Evey Reidy
Evey Reidy is a PhD student working on a Techne Creative Doctoral Award co-supervised by Roehampton University and Shakespeare’s Globe. Her research focuses on female performers in non-commercial drama and their use of performance-as-protest in the early seventeenth century. This research will be the basis for an original play that tells the story of a group of performers in Wells, Somerset and their defiant performances that rocked the small city in 1607. Other research interests include early modern mortuary and funerary culture, theatrical and visual representations of death and grief, memento mori, and contemporary playwriting. When not working on her research, she can usually be found wandering in a cemetery or churchyard.
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 is a Linguistics PhD student at Lancaster University. Her main area of research is in historical computational linguistics, with particular focus on the nature of the language in the genre of early modern English dramatic texts. She is particularly interested in the intersection between literary thought and linguistic evidence…and is often found in the depths of the EEBO corpus.
Emily Smith
Revels Officer and Founding Member
Emily Smith is an assistante 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 research website can be found here, and her mildly humorous choose-your-own-adventure-stories and teaching tools can be found at shakespeerie.itch.io.
Gina Walter
Founding Member
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.
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