Project title
Fiery Bodies: Staging Fire in Early Modern Drama
Research question
How did early modern dramatists stage fire? And how did this reflect cultural preoccupations with this unruly element?
Project description
Fire had a wide range of cultural associations in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. This project asks how early modern dramatists responded to the challenges, provocations, and inconsistencies of this element. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from anthropology, philosophy, the medical humanities, and the cultural history of the emotions, I seek to understand our historic fascination with flames, reading for a poetics of fire in early modern literature.
Selected publications
- On the Threshold: Hospitality in Shakespeare’s Drama, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press
- ‘Pericles and the Secret’, Shakespeare (2022): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17450918.2022.2066166