Overview

I am a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing. My research and teaching focus upon sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature, especially the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. I specialize in examining how contemporary ideas about the body informed the performance of age and gender upon the early modern stage. These ideas are reflected in my teaching, which centres upon Shakespeare, performance and the early modern life cycle.

I convene the following modules: "Rethinking Shakespeare" (Level 1); "Life and Death in Early Modern Literature" (Level 3);  I co-convene "Shakespeare's Women" (Level 2, Inbound Study Abroad).

My office is 302, Queen's Building. The room is wheelchair accessible by lift (located in the main foyer of the building). To book an office hour meeting, please email me: vs216@exeter.ac.uk

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Research

Research and Publications:

Book. (2024). Shakespeare's Adolescents: Age, Gender and the Body in Shakespearean Performance and Early Modern Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Article. (2023). Co-authored with Pascale Aebischer, Amber Ash, Jessica Boyd, Aimee Canning, Natasha Cooper, Noami Freedman, Sofia Gallucci, Zoe Heslop, Charlie Nadin, Chloe Preedy, Phylly Rush, and Connor Webster, '"Fond and Frivolous Gestures": A Blocking Workshop on Marlowe's Tamburlaine", Marlowe Studies. Special Issue: Teaching Marlowe 

Article. (2020). Co-authored with P .Aebischer. “Black, White and Blue: Pregnancy and Unsettled Binaries in Masque of Blackness (1605)”, Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance. Special Issue: Shakespeare, Blackface, and Performance: A Global Exploration.

Review. (2020). Shakespeare's Contagious Sympathies: Ill Communications, in Modern Language Review, 115.4: 897-99.

Review. (2016) Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England by Jennifer Evans (Boydell Press, 2014), Gender and History.

Article. (2015) "Performing Puberty: Fertile Complexions in Shakespeare’s Love Plots." Shakespeare Bulletin. 33.3: 441-467

Review. (2014). Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England by Sara Read (Palgrave, 2013), Social History of Medicine.

Blog Entry. (2013) ‘A Mother’s Milk’ www.earlymodernmedicine.com. Also distributed in the ‘Baby Feeding and Baby Changing’ Tent at Reigate Community Festival as part of their ‘Shakespeare’ theme (Surrey, Summer 2016).

Article. (2012) "Identity-Formation and the Breastfeeding Mother in Renaissance Generative Discourses and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus," Social History of Medicine: 777-794.

Review, (2010). Wounds, Flesh and Metaphor by Sara Covington. (Palgrave, 2009) Reviews in History.

I have been a reader for Shakespeare Bulletin and Social History of Medicine.

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