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.

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

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

9th March 2023
Lead 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
Lead by: Emily Smith
“Recovery”

22nd December 2022
Lead 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
Lead by: Emily Smith
‘Bring a Problem’ Session

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

19th July 2022
Lead 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
Lead by: Lily Freeman-Jones
August, Hannah. Playbooks and Their Readers in Early Modern England. Routledge, 2022.

24th May 2022
Lead 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
Lead 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
Lead by: Mirjam Haas
Richards, Jennifer. ‘Introduction’. Voices and Books in the English Renaissance, Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 1-33.

18th January 2022
Lead 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
Lead 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
Lead by: Lucy Holehouse
Middleton, Thomas. The Widdow, London: Humphrey Moseley, 1652.

13th September 2021
Lead 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
Lead 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
Lead 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
Lead 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
Lead 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
Lead 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
Lead 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.