Speakers
Alison Findlay is Professor of Renaissance Drama at Lancaster University and Chair of the British Shakespeare Association. Her books include Illegitimate Power (1994), A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (1999), Women in Shakespeare (2010). She co-edited Twelfth Night: A Critical Reader (2014) and Shakespeare and Greece (2017), both for Arden. Alison is co-investigator on the AHRC ‘Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language’ project at Lancaster http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/shakespearelang/ which uses corpus linguistics to explore Shakespeare’s language at multiple levels – words, phrases, semantic themes, the linguistic profiles of character and plays – and what such words would have meant for early modern spectators and readers.
Alison also researches the drama of Shakespeare’s ‘sisters’ or female contemporaries, editing and staging their work. http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/shakespeare-and-his-sisters/
She is a founding director of The Rose Company, which has staged Lady Jane Lumley’s Iphigenia at Aulis (c.1555) and I Have a Speech of Fire, a collage of dialogues from Shakespeare on speech, silence and gender. http://therosecompany.posthaven.com/ Alison is co-author of Women and Dramatic Production 1550-1700 (2000) and author of Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama (2006). She has recently produced a site specific performance of Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory (c1617-19) at Penshurst Place and is currently editing the manuscript for publication by Revels Plays.
Alison will be speaking to Melvyn Bragg about 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' on the Radio 4 programme 'In Our Time', 0900, Thursday 18th May.
Dr Peter Kirwan is Associate Professor of Early Modern Drama at the University of Nottingham. He began his academic career working at the CAPITAL Centre (now the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning) at Warwick. His research interests span contemporary performance, early modern book history, textual editing and Shakespeare on film. His books include Shakespeare in the Theatre: Cheek by Jowl (Bloomsbury, 2019), Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha (Cambridge, 2015) and the co-edited collections Canonising Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2017) and Shakespeare and the Digital World (Cambridge, 2014), for which he oversaw a section on pedagogy. He is book reviews editor for Early Theatre, performance reviews editor for Shakespeare Bulletin, and a former trustee of the British Shakespeare Association.
Dr Sarah Olive is a Senior Lecturer in English in Education at the University of York. She is also a Visiting Lecturer at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. Her monograph Shakespeare Valued was published in 2015 (Intellect). Her most pressing current project is a co-authored book, Shakespeare in East Asian Education, for Palgrave with Kohei Uchimaru (Toyo), Adele Lee (Emerson) and Rosalind Fielding (Birmingham). When she gets the chance, she writes on Shakespeare in popular culture, particularly television.
Dr Nora Williams is an independent scholar. Her PhD was completed in Early Modern Drama at the University of Exeter in 2016, with the support of a College of Humanities International Studentship. Since then her work has been published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Early Modern Literary Studies, and PARtake: The Journal of Practice as Research, as well as an edited collection on Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation (ed. Kara Reilly) and the online theatre commons Howlround. Since 2015, she has been developing a long-term practice-as-research project, Measure (Still) for Measure, which uses an intersectional, feminist, collaborative approach to Shakespeare performance in an effort to facilitate conversations about rape culture and advocate for policy change in educational institutions. This work has so far been funded by Exeter City Council, the Bike Shed Theatre, Nichols School, and Dalhousie University. More information about her work can be found at http://norajwilliams.hcommons.org.
Students working on The Revenger's Tragedy with Professor Alison Findlay
Dr Peter Kirwan
Dr Sarah Olive
Measure (Still) for Measure workshop at Nichols School with Dr Nora Williams