Background

I took up the position of Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute in January 2007.  I came to Stratford from Trinity College, Oxford, where I wrote a D.Phil. thesis entitled ‘“All the Men and Women Merely Players”: Quoting Shakespeare in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Novel’.  My interest in Shakespeare’s reception and quotation began during my undergraduate studies at Trinity and developed during an MA in English: Renaissance to Enlightenment at University College London.

Teaching

At Oxford I taught courses on Shakespeare and eighteenth-century fiction to undergraduates and to ERASMUS and American visiting students.  I was also involved in delivering graduate training sessions  and organising events to bring together the graduate research community.  At The Shakespeare Institute, I teach 'Plays and Poems of Shakespeare' on the MA Shakespeare Studies programme and give undergraduate lectures.

Research

As post-doctoral researcher I coordinate the major AHRC-funded research project, ‘Interrogating cultural value in the twenty-first century: the case of "'Shakespeare'".  This four-year investigation will be the work of Kate McLuskie, myself and two PhD students (Emily Burden and Sarah Olive), and will result in a comprehensive picture of the value of Shakespeare in England in the twenty-first century, in the theatre, in arts funding policy, in education, and in public perception.  My work will focus on ‘Literary Heritage and Cultural Value’, and having studied the ambiguous meaning of ‘Shakespeare’ in the eighteenth century I am delighted to extend my research forwards to the present day.

Conferences

I have given papers at the Britgrad Shakespeare Conference, the British Shakespeare Association Conference and the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference.  I was co-organiser of 2006 Oxford English Graduate Conference, and am co-ordinating the Stratford day of the 2007 British Shakespeare Association Conference.

Interests

Singing, Pilates, dancing, literacy.

Selected Publications:

‘Quoting Shakespeare in the eighteenth-century novel’, Borrowers and Lenders: the Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, Vol II.2 (Fall/Winter 2006) http://lachesis.english.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/request?id=590861

‘”So common-hackneyed in the eyes of men”: Banal Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’, Literature Compass, Graduate Essay Prize (runner-up)  Literature Compass 4 (3) (May 2007), 610–621. doi:10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00444.x.

Entries on several eighteenth-century novelists in the Greenwood Shakespeare Encyclopedia, Summer 2007

‘Reading for Pleasure: A Research Overview’, National Literacy Trust monograph, November 2006  (with Christina Clark).

Other Activities:

I am Associate Editor of Routledge’s Annotated Bibliography of English Studies, an online database of recent publications in English literary studies, with responsibility for the Early Modern section.