not without mustard :: research

Research

Early Modern English Drama and Culture

The principal focus of my research is the cultural world of early modern England, particularly the literary and dramatic works of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Along with Deborah Cartmell (De Montfort University), Gabriel Egan (Loughborough University), Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University) and Tom Rutter (Sheffield Hallam University), I co-edit Shakespeare, an international scholarly journal of Shakespeare studies. I am also an assistant editor of Appositions, an electronic journal of Renaissance literature and culture. With Mark Houlahan (University of Waikato) and Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers (University of Western Australia), I am Vice President of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association for 2010—2012.

My interest in literature lies in the historical and the material conditions of its production, and the ideological, cultural, and political contexts of its transmission and reception. In particular, I’m fascinated by the ways in which different textual and visual narratives are transmitted, adapted, and appropriated to suit changing religious, social, and political agendas. I’m also interested in the ways that medieval and early modern plays have been (or can/should be) adapted into other media (especially electronic media) and cultural forms, such as film, children’s literature, graphic novels, puppetry, advertising and visual culture, and cartoons. My dream is to one day be involved in the production of animated versions of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. If anyone is working on a stop-animation Volpone, get in touch!

Digital Humanities and Textual Scholarship

Much of my current work falls under the broad rubric of “digital humanities,” a term I take to refer to the exploration and application of methodologies from computing to traditional humanities research (and vice versa). This meeting of worlds and technologies, old and new, offers potentially new and exciting avenues for scholarship.

My interest in digital humanities led to a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Victoria, where I was involved with the development of the Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn) and its companion Professional Reading Environment (PReE), as well as print and electronic editions of the Devonshire Manuscript (British Library MS Add. 17492). Whilst at Victoria, I was responsible for developing the undergraduate curriculum in digital humanities, as well as research collaborations with members of the Humanities Computing and Media Centre.

My interest in the material conditions of literary and dramatic production inevitably led to a fascination with bibliography and textual scholarship — in particular, the various processes by which Renaissance dramatic texts are mediated, to both historical and contemporary readers and audiences. According to W. W. Greg’s Bibliography of English Printed Drama to the Restoration, there are roughly 836 plays printed between 1512 and 1689. This figure, of course, does not include the many plays that survive only in manuscript. The majority of these plays are not available in modern critical editions, and have still to receive adequate scholarly attention.

Enter the Digital Renaissance Editions, the major focus of my current three-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Western Australia. The project seeks to publish fully annotated, critical editions of early modern English drama, inspired by and modeled on the Internet Shakespeare Editions. This project, of which I am coordinating editor, is conceived as a marriage between bibliography and textual scholarship, digital humanities, and computational stylistics. In addition to the sort of scholarly apparatus one expects in print editions, these electronic editions will also offer powerful search functions, concordances, tools for textual and stylistic analysis, and rich multimedia content.