• Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama
• Sensory Studies and Kinesics
• Embodied Cognition and Gesture
• Sound Studies and Soundscapes
• Ecocriticism and Animal Studies
• Early Modern Material Culture

Timothy Holden (he/him) is a doctoral researcher in Prof. Dr. Isabel Karremann’s SNF-project “DramaSCAPEs”. He completed his BA in English and History at the University of Würzburg, and as a visiting student at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. He completed his MA in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Zurich. His MA-Thesis, “Sounding the Hunt: The Soundscapes of Early Modern Hunting in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Beyond”, received a Semesterpreis award from UZH’s Faculty of Arts.

Timothy Holden’s PhD-project is entitled “Sense-Scapes: Proprioception and Kinaesthesia in Shakespeare’s Early Modern Playhouses”. The project investigates embodied sensation in Shakespeare’s plays and playhouses by drawing on the neurobiological concepts of “proprioception” – denoting the perception of the body in space – and “kinaesthesia” – denoting the perception of bodily movement. The project asks how plays, actors, and audiences “made sense” in and of performances in the material environment of early modern playhouses:

• How were playgoers prompted to perceive, move through, and understand these spaces of shared bodily presence, co-spectatorship, and social emplacement?
• And how did plays negotiate processes of embodied perception through which characters, actors, and spectators experience physical emplacement and motion?

To approach these questions, the project explores moments of sensory crisis and of sensory resilience in Shakespeare’s plays, as well as their resonance in the playhouses and beyond. Drawing on concepts from New Materialism, sensory studies, cognition studies, disability studies, historical phenomenology, and neurophysiology, the project aims to offer a wide, interdisciplinary framework for understanding embodied sensations in early modern playhouses.