Our reading groups began in January 2021. Each session is lead by PGRs and ECRs who have chosen a text or idea, created prompts, and guided the discussion. You can see details of our next reading group here.

28th April 2025
‘Auto-Theory and Form’
Led by: Liesl Jensen

31st March 2025
Keyword Session: ‘Giving Up’

24th February 2025
‘Bring a Problem’ Session

30th January 2025
Led by: Allison Lemley
Karremann, Isabel, ‘Introduction: Forms of Remembering and Forgetting in Early Modern England and on the Shakespearean Stage’, in The Drama of Memory in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 1–35.

16th December 2024
‘Bring a Thing’ Session

25th November 2024
Led by: Mirjaam Haas
Richardson, Catherine, ‘“More Things in Heaven and Earth”: Materiality and the Stage’, Shakespeare, 15.1 (2019), pp. 88–103.

25th October 2024
Led by: Maria Maciejewska
Careers at Heritage Institutions with Dr Alice Marples (British Library), Dr Emily Roy (Bath Assembly Rooms/National Trust), and Dr Zanna Van Loon (Museum Plantin-Moretus)

25th September 2024
‘Bring a Problem’/keyword hybrid session: ‘New Beginnings’

30th May 2024
Fellowship Applications with Dr Nicole Sheriko (Yale University)

25th April 2024
Led by: Mirjam Haas
Smith, Emma. ‘What is a Book?’ Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers, Allen Lane, 2022.

28th March 2024
Led by: Bethan Davies
‘Bring a Problem’ Session

15th February 2024
PostDoc Session
With Dr Hailey Bachrach (University of Roehampton), Dr Anouska Lester (University of York), and Dr Callan Davies (University of Southampton)

18th January 2024
Led by: Eleonora Terleckienė
Melehy, Hassan. ‘Off the Human Track: Montaigne, Deleuze, and the Materialization of Philosophy’. Early Modern Écologies: Beyond English Ecocriticism, edited by P Goul and P. J. Usher, 2020, pp. 23–46.

12th December 2023
Led by: Gina Walter
‘Bring a Problem’ Session

15th November 2023
Led by: Lily Freeman-Jones
Ndiaye, Noémie. Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.

19th October 2023
Led by: Gina Walter
Davies, Callan. ‘Matter-Theatre: Construction in Cymbeline’. Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 36, no. 1, 2018, pp. 69–88.

27th September 2023
Led by: Gina Walter
‘Bring a Problem’ Session

27th July 2023
Led by: Mirjam Haas
Maguire, Laurie. The Rhetoric of the Page. Oxford University Press, 2020.

22nd June 2023
Led by: Lily Freeman-Jones
‘Bring a Problem’ Session

24th April 2023
Led by: Juliana Beykirch
‘Bring a Problem’ Session

9th March 2023
Led by: Juliana Beykirch
Bratton, Jacky. “Reading the Intertheatrical, or, The Mysterious Disappearance of Susanna Centlivre”, published in Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies (Manchester UP, 2000, pp. 7-21).

2nd February 2023
Led by: Emily Smith
Keyword Session: ‘Recovery’

22nd December 2022
Led by: Mirjam Haas
‘How We Read’. Arts & Ideas, BBC Radio Three, 7 Oct. 2022.

12th December 2022
Monstrous Writing Workshop with Dr Line Henriksen

10th November 2022
Led by: Emily Smith
‘Bring a Problem’ Session

23rd August 2022
Led by: Mirjam Haas
Webster, John. The Tragedy of the Dvtchesse of Malfy, London: Nicholas Okes, 1623.

19th July 2022
Led by: Evey Reidy
Whipday, Emma and Freyja Cox Jensen. “‘Original Practices’, Lost Plays, and Historical Imagination: Staging The Tragedy of Merry.” Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 35 no. 2, 2017, pp. 289-307.

28th June 2022
Led by: Lily Freeman-Jones
August, Hannah. Playbooks and Their Readers in Early Modern England. Routledge, 2022.

24th May 2022
Led by: Sam Jermy
Caton, Kristina E. ‘Shared Borders: The Puppet in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair’. Early Theatre, vol. 16, no. 1, June 2013.

19th April 2022
Led by: Anouska Lester
Brayman Hackel, Heidi, and Ian Frederick Moulton. Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives. Modern Language Association of America, 2015.

8th February 2022
Led by: Mirjam Haas
Richards, Jennifer. ‘Introduction’. Voices and Books in the English Renaissance, Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 1-33.

18th January 2022
Led by: Anouska Lester
Cline, Lauren Eriks. ‘Becoming Caliban: Monster Methods and Performance Theories’. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, edited by Valerie Traub, Oxford University Press, 2016.

14th December 2021
Led by: Sam Jermy
Chess, Simone. ‘Queer Residue: Boy Actors’ Adult Careers in Early Modern England’. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 19, no. 4, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019, pp. 242-64.

16th November 2021
Conversation with Dr Sophie Duncan (University of Oxford) about Shakespeare’s Props: Memory and Cognition.

19th October 2021
Led by: Lucy Holehouse
Middleton, Thomas. The Widdow, London: Humphrey Moseley, 1652.

13th September 2021
Led by: Bethan Davies and Lily Freeman-Jones
Lees-Jeffries, Hester. ‘Mantled in Blood Shakespeare’s Bloodstains and Early Modern Textile Culture’. Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400-1700, edited by Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018, pp. 61-78.

16th August 2021
Led by: Emily Smith and Sierra Carter
Newman, Harry. ‘Reading Metatheatre’. Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 36, no. 1, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, pp. 89-110.

16th July 2021
Conversation with Professor David McInnis (University of Melbourne) about Shakespeare and Lost Plays and the Lost Plays Database.

14th June 2021
Led by: Anna Hegland and Sierra Carter
Hobgood, Allison P. ‘Introduction: Pondering Playgoers’. Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 1-33.

17th May 2021
Conversation with Dr Andy Kesson (University of Roehampton) about Box Office Bears, Before Shakespeare, and A Bit Lit.

19th April 2021
Led by: Sierra Carter and Anouska Lester
Wall-Randell, Sarah. ‘What Is a Staged Book? Books as “Actors” in the Early Modern English Theatre’. Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England, edited by Tiffany Stern, The Arden Shakespeare, 2019, pp. 129-51.

22nd March 2021
Led by: Sam Jermy
Karim-Cooper, Farah. ‘“This Alters Not Thy Beauty”: Face-Paint, Gender and Race in Richard Brome’s” The English Moor’. Early Theatre, vol. 10, no. 2, JSTOR, 2007, pp. 140-49.

22nd February 2021
Led by: Emily Rowe
Floyd-Wilson, Mary. ‘English Mettle’. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, edited by Gail Kern Paster et al., University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, pp. 130-46.

25th January 2021
Led by: Anna Hegland
Bailey, Amanda. ‘Is This a Man I See Before Me? Early Modern Masculinities and the New Materialisms’. The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Gaimster et al., Taylor & Francis, 2017, pp. 293-305.