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My dissertation project investigates the period’s communal concepts of justice by focusing on environmental issues and on how affects are mobilised around these conflicts to create communities. So far, literary criticism has primarily engaged with ideas of communal justice that were articulated or enacted in the period’s courtrooms. Yet, these collective ideas were also a crucial dimension of everyday life and were particularly pronounced in questions about equitable behaviour and access to natural resources. Literature played a crucial role in the ecological entanglements between community, environment, and early modern discourses of law and justice. Through their emotional affects, literary works were able to shape ideas of justice and could present attempts to intervene in the processes that threatened particular communal constellations. Specifically, my research centres on how sixteenth and seventeenth century theatre plays and poems engaged with the environmental problems of enclosure, deforestation, dearth, and instances of extreme weather. To trace these nuanced interconnections, my framework builds on recent developments in affect studies, ecological theory, new materialism, and historical phenomenology.
Lukas Arnold holds a BA and MA degree in English Literature and Linguistics from the University of Zurich, where I wrote my master’s thesis on commoner politics and the performance of social justice in Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (1605).
My current research project is funded by the Doc.CH scheme of the Swiss National Fond (SNF): SNF Grants
Personal Profile: Lukas Arnold
Contact: lukas.arnold@uzh.ch
My dissertation project investigates how representations of mobility on the early modern stage forged affective and cognitive communities, and how such communities responded to mobile people, objects, and ideas in ethical terms. The project focuses on a diverse selection of playtexts from the period between the 1580s and 1642 that stage phenomena like travel and migration, displacement and emplacement, infrastructures and networks. Several overarching research questions guide the reading of these playtexts: What challenges and opportunities are negotiated in the plays when communities encounter mobile agents or become mobile themselves? How do the plays thereby affectively and cognitively address their audiences and what ethical, communal responses do they invoke? How do these considerations shape our critical understanding of such affective and cognitive communities in an age of mobility? To address these questions, the project draws on different strands of recent scholarship, such as mobility studies, early modern performance studies, theatre history, historical disability studies, and Blue Humanities. As the plays stage how communities in playworlds respond to challenges of mobility in ethical terms, they in turn offer affective and cognitive models for the audiences’ own responses to these challenges in the playhouse and beyond. By exploring such communal, ethical responses to social changes resulting from mobility, the project addresses concerns that were as pertinent in the early modern period as they are today.
Ann-Sophie Bosshard (she/her) has completed her BA in German literature and linguistics, history, and English literature and linguistics at the University of Zurich (with additional courses in Bern and Basel) and her MA in German literature and linguistics and English literature and linguistics at the University of Zurich and the University of Tübingen. She is currently enrolled in the teaching diploma programme at the University of Zurich and is working on her PhD project within the framework of the DramaSCAPEs-project.
Personal Profile: Ann-Sophie Bosshard
Contact: ann-sophie.bosshard@uzh.ch
My research is situated at the intersection of the Medical Renaissance, disability studies, and early modern epistemology in England’s theatre culture. The dissertation is premised on an elemental dialectic of the human body: while it is the corporeal site where ideas about being human converge and contend with each other, it is also the medium through which experiences are perceived and mediated. The project thus proceeds to explore the question of how subjectivity is shaped by/with disabled bodies. Taking into account the conventional and new knowledge of the human body as eventuated by the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Scientific Revolution, this question becomes more significant as it warrants a rethink on the construction of selfhood in relation to presumptions about bodily norms in the history of Western society. The dissertation adopts a universalising view of early modern disability studies to reassess modern paradigms of able-bodiedness. It proposes that the early modern theatre articulated and disseminated knowledge on embodiments of human variation in forms of disability. It investigates how particular social conceptions and material conditions of disability affect the disabled characters’ senses of self in early modern drama, as well as the ways in which these characters remap livable physical and social environments.
Jifeng Huang holds a BA in English and an MA in Literary Studies. His MA thesis, “Effeminacy and Warriorship in English Renaissance Drama”, received a Semesterpreis award from UZH’s Faculty of Arts. His research interests include, among others, the human body and embodiment, health and disease, gender and sexuality in early modern English literature.
Personal Profile: Jifeng Huang
Contact: jifeng.huang@uzh.ch
My PhD-project explores the “sense-scapes” of early modern and especially Shakespearean drama by approaching embodied sense perception through the concepts of “proprioception” and “kinaesthesia”. Proprioception denotes the perception of the body in space, while kinaesthesia denotes the perception of bodily movement. The project thus 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, I explore moments of sensory crisis (e.g., hallucination, intoxication, blindness) and of sensory resilience in early modern 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, neurophysiology, my project aims to offer a wider, interdisciplinary framework for understanding sensations in early modern playhouses.
Timothy Holden has completed his BA in English and History at the University of Würzburg (Germany), and, as a visiting student in 2019-20, reading English 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 Soundscape of Early Modern Hunting in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Beyond”, received a Semesterpreis award from UZH’s Faculty of Arts. His PhD-project is part of the DramaSCAPEs-project.
Contact: timothy.holden@es.uzh.ch
My dissertation project explores English travel literature across the periods of the mid-14th to the mid-19th centuries with a main research focus on smell perception in written travel accounts. It examines the functions of smell culture and smellscapes in the English travel narratives from the 1350s to 1850s on the material of written accounts of pilgrimages, travels to Orient and the Far East, and Grand Tours to Europe. This work intends to reconstruct the development of olfactory experiences and olfactory scenes across historical and cultural contexts during the three main historical periods. I am particularly interested in the changing roles of smells, their cultural, social and political functions, and their categorisations in early modern travel accounts.
Olena Morenets holds a BA in Italian Philology as well as an MA in Italian Language and Literature, and English Language (including translation). Before starting her PhD in English Literature, she worked as a translator (Italian, English ⇆ Ukrainian) and interpreter (Italian ⇆Ukrainian). As an English linguist, she collaborated with IT platforms working with natural language processing and speech recognition systems, among which was Amazon Alexa. She also taught at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Now she focuses on English literature and olfactory studies.
Contact: olena.morenets@uzh.ch
My research explores the ‘desirability politics’ in the literary genre of historical romance. My dissertation seeks to underline how the representation of desire in novels under this category was traditionally limited to a white, cisheteronormative, abled body with backdrops fashioned from a colonial perspective, but also how more recent novels written by authors from a more diverse background have worked to challenge this hegemonic framework. Through a comparative analysis, this dissertation aims to highlight the strategies and impact of positioning protagonists from marginalized groups as the desiring subjects of romance. With the help of theoretical texts from intersectional approaches, this dissertation seeks to explore how romance and desire are not just a medium for escapism and pleasure but a political tool to enhearten change. My project also aspires to make more visible in the mainstream, academic world the diverse, overlooked romances written by authors of marginalized identities. I am currently enraptured by the works of Lydia San Andres, Alyssa Cole, Beverly Jenkins, Julia Quinn, and Mary Balogh, and am open to receiving any new book recommendations.
Nadia Teh holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Guelph in Canada and an MA in English Literature and Culture from Leiden University in the Netherlands. In 2020, she completed her MA thesis titled She bleeds under your white male gaze: The Dialectics of Sex and Race in Madame Butterfly which examined how race and gender intersected with sexual-based power in the text. Her interests lie in gender studies, the history of sexuality, Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Contemporary literature.
Contact: nadia.teh@uzh.ch
