Research Profile

My international research profile is based on six published projects with Cambridge University Press over a period of 22 years in the field of Shakespeare and performance history, an ongoing relationship with Shakespeare’s Globe and a longstanding interaction with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the British Library and the theatre photographer Donald Cooper. Beginning with a groundbreaking digital edition (The Cambridge King Lear CD-ROM: Text and Performance Archive, 2000) my research publications have continued to both challenge and define the discipline.

While working on two large AHRB funded digital projects in the Drama Department I set up and led the Centre of Multimedia Performance History (1999-2003). This involved managing two sizable grants with both staffing and budgetary responsibility. Both the King Lear CD and Designing Shakespeare: an Audio Visual Archive, 1960-2000 presented resources online for the first time, changing what was possible to image in the field of performance history. 

Over my career I have developed a hybrid approach to criticism which brings together the detail and specificity of an English close reading of performance with the desire to situate that close study politically, historically and socially, in line with the methods of theatre history research. Using the plays in performance as a means of generating cross-cultural dialogue has been a key aim. 

Two collections of essays (Shakespeare Beyond English with Susan Bennett (CUP, 2013), and Shakespeare and the Digital World with Peter Kirwan (CUP, 2014)), highlight this work. The first of these collections examines the implications of non-English adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays as produced as part of an international festival for a cosmopolitan audience, using the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival as a case study. The second of these collections of essays deals with the implications of the availability of digital resources for the study of Shakespeare worldwide. 

Together these two edited collections consolidate the wide scope of my research activity. I have presented papers on my research in the United States, Australia, France, Romania, Italy and Sweden.