Early Modern Drama: Memory Studies, Historical Phenomenology, Cultural Geography

Memory and Affect in Shakespeare’s England (co-edited with Jonathan Baldo for Cambridge University Press, 2023) is the first collection to systematically combine the fields of memory studies and affect studies. It thus proposes a fresh paradigm through which early modern culture and literature are reconsidered. Bringing together 15 original essays by international scholars, it approaches the intersection of memory and affect from a broad range of concerns and methodologies central to the study of early modern culture: theatre history and dramaturgy; intersection of text and performance; temporal and spatial modalities; the reception of classical texts; the interplay of remembering and forgetting in the making of emotional memory; trauma studies; the politics and ethics of memory; role of emotions in the production of individual and collective memory; selfhood and nationhood. 

I have just edited a volume for the Arden Shakespeare Intersections Series. Shakespeare / Space (Bloomsbury, 2024) explores new approaches to the enactment of ‘space’ in and through Shakespeare’s plays, as well as to the material, cognitive and virtual spaces in which they are enacted. With contributions from 14 leading and emergent experts in their fields, the collection forges innovative connections between spatial studies and cultural geography, cognitive studies, memory studies, phenomenology and the history of the emotions, gender and race studies, rhetoric and language, translation studies, theatre history and performance studies. Each chapter offers methodological reflections on intersections such as space/mobility, space/emotion, space/supernatural, space/language, space/race and space/digital, whose critical purchase is demonstrated in close readings of plays like King Lear, The Comedy of Errors, Othello or Shakespeare’s history plays. They testify to the importance of space for our understanding of Shakespeare’s creative and theatrical practice, and at the same time enlarge our understanding of space as a critical concept in the humanities.