Keynote Speakers

We are pleased to announce that the New York Keynote speaker will be Hannah Crawforth of King’s College, London, and the London Keynote speaker will be Will Fisher of The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Hannah Crawforth is a Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at King’s College, London, where she is a founding member of the London Shakespeare Centre. She has a PhD from Princeton, where she held the Jacobus prize, awarded annually to the top four graduate students at the University. Her doctoral dissertation focussed upon etymology in the Early Modern period, tracing the ways in which an increasingly historical approach to the study of the English language impacted upon poets including Spenser, Jonson and Milton. She is currently working on a book charting the relationship between literature and the emerging discipline of linguistics in Early Modern England. In addition, Dr Crawforth is writing a study guide for Arden entitled Shakespeare in London, analysing the playwright’s connections to the city in which he worked. She is also a textual editor for the Norton Shakespeare, for which she is preparing The Two Noble Kinsmen. Her articles have appeared in a variety of essay collections and journals including New Medieval Literatures and The Journal for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

Will Fisher is Associate Professor of English at Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center.  He works primarily on the history of gender and sexuality. His first book – Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture – was published by Cambridge University Press in 2006 and was awarded the Best Book Award of that year from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. It argues that seemingly peripheral items like beards, codpieces, hair and handkerchiefs played an important role in constructing gendered identity in early modern English culture. Prof Fisher’s articles have appeared in journals like Renaissance Quarterly, English Literary History, Shakespeare Studies, Textual Practice and The Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, as well as numerous anthologies and edited collections. He is currently working on two different book-length projects in the field of the history of sexuality. The first is a volume on sexual practices in early modern English culture (with chapters on kissing, chinchucking, intercrural intercourse, cunnilingus, the use of dildos, and flogging), and the second is a book on “bisexuality” and notions of sexual orientation.