Douglas Clark is a PhD candidate in the department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. His doctoral research is concerned with investigating the multifarious representations and operations of the ‘will’ within the literature of the English Renaissance. His essay ‘Being, Nothingness and the Female Body in Early Modern Drama’ features in Transgression and Its Limits. Cambridge Scholars Press: Newcastle, 2012. ISBN: 1-4438-3729-6. His essay ‘The Legacy of the Will’ is currently under review for publication within a collection entitled Reclaiming the Soul (Forthcoming, Ashgate Press). He also maintains a keen interest in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and the work of Jacques Derrida.

Isabel Karremann studied English and Comparative Literature in Munich and at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Having taught at the universities of Tuebingen and Frankfurt, she returned to Munich University where she is now a senior lecturer in English Literature and Shakespeare Studies. Recent publications include articles on Shakespearean history plays and on cultural memory; she has edited a volume on negotiations of confessional conflicts in early modern Europe, entitled Forgetting Faith (2011). Her current research project is entitled Practices of Forgetting in Shakespearean Historical Drama and Early Modern Culture, and examines the ways in acts of forgetting (as well as of remembering) shaped English cultural and historical memory, and how Shakespeare’s plays stage this process of formation and transformation.

Dr Ord is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at UWE, Bristol, having previously taught at the universities of Liverpool, Newcastle and Leeds, where she received her PhD. She is the author of Travel and Experience in Early Modern English Literature (Palgrave, 2008) and of articles on early modern travellers such as Sir Henry Wotton, Anthony Munday, and Thomas Coryat.

I am in the final stages of completing a doctoral thesis at New College, Oxford. My thesis is about the emergence of the essay as a genre in English in the early seventeenth century, with particular focus on the work of Sir William Cornwallis the Younger, although I also have a secondary focus on John Florio’s English translation of Montaigne’s Essais. I am especially interested in the relationship between reading and rhetoric, and also in aspects of material book history, in particular early-modern readers’ annotations and commonplace books.

At present, I am working as a research assistant for Dr. James McBain at Magdalen College Oxford, contributing towards his project on late medieval and early modern drama at Oxford University.  My doctoral research at Jesus College University of Oxford explored the aesthetics of spectacle in the drama of Robert Greene.  I am interested in all aspects of early modern literature, especially in Shakespeare, early modern drama, cultural history, visual culture and performance studies

[Bio to come.]

I graduated with a PhD in Medieval and Early Modern Studies from the University of Kent.  My thesis is entitled Satire and Anxieties concerning Female Sexuality and Transexuality in Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean England.  It traces themes of gender and sexual perversion in early modern literature to reveal evidence of an extensive fear of the malleability of gender.  I am currently in discussions concerning the publishing of my monograph and I am preparing articles for submission to journals. Early modern literature dominates my research, with a particular focus upon identity, gender and sexuality.  I am intrigued by transformations in contemporary attitudes and anxieties concerning sexual behaviour.  At present, I am researching early modern concepts of place and how these representations relate to sexual identity.  I am also inspired by the potential of new technology to widen access to the literary riches of the early modern period.

I am a third-year PhD student at the University of Manchester and my thesis is concerned with the ideas of prayer and performance in Milton’s poetry and prose works. Following current critical debates on early modern subjectivity, on devotional practice, and on the relationship between religion and drama, I examine moments in Milton’s writings where his intense preoccupation with performance is not limited to the strictly theatrical but expands to include the exercise of prayer. I argue that in his understanding of prayer as a performance (with a spectator, an audience, and a script), Milton articulates a petitionary model not of inaccessible interiority but of combined physicality and spirituality. I am also interested in closet drama, devotional manuals, and the elusive nature of hypocrisy.

Dr Fay Tudor completed her PhD thesis as the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, where she taught across a range of the department’s courses, co-founded and edited the department’s journal Ecloga, contributed reviews to Routledge’s Bibiography of English Studies, and participated in conferences which have yielded opportunities to publish.  Her work examines the important conceptual connection between the mechanics of the science of vision and the technology of the mirror, in order to offer a more fully contextualised discussion of the mirror and vision throughout the literature and art of the early modern period.  She is currently continuing her research and participation in conferences while searching for an academic job opportunity.

Aleksandra’s main area of interest is English Renaissance theatre especially modern and inter/multi-cultural performance and early modern literary theory.

She holds an MA from Warsaw University. Her PhD project entitled  ‘Liquid’ Shakespeare: change and continuity in the adaptation of William Shakespeare’s plays in 21^st century Poland addresses a fluid and changing approach to staging and interpretation that has always been characteristic of the adaptation of Shakespearean drama in Poland. This research project is located at the intersection of Shakespeare studies, performance studies, sociological and cultural studies, at the historical time best described by Anglo-Polish social thinker Zygmunt Bauman as ‘liquid modernity’. Aleksandra borrows this term to describe the place of Shakespeare in a country which, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, is still in flux, its society searching for new points of reference and values in the brave new world of democracy, capitalism and personal freedom. In October 2012 she curates an exhibition she invited to KCL, entitled THE THEATRE OF TWO TIMES. The aim of this exhibition is to chart the history of an Elizabethan-style Polish theatre from its beginnings in 17^th century Gdansk to today.

Alison studied English Literature at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, before moving on to an MLitt in American Studies at the University of Glasgow and the University of Oklahoma. The MLitt dissertation, on Roger Williams’s Key into the Language of America, led to a PhD at King’s College, London, focusing on the role of language in the construction and portrayal of identity in the literature of seventeenth-century Puritan New England. Alison completed her PhD in August 2012 and is currently employed as a Teaching Fellow in American Literature at King’s College, London.

Matthew Dimmock is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sussex. His work has focussed on Anglo-Islamic encounters in the early modern period and his publications include New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (2005) and William Percy’s Mahomet and His Heaven: A Critical Edition (2006). His second monograph, Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture is currently in press with CUP.

Isabel Calderón-López is a full-time lecturer at the University of Cádiz (Spain), where she teaches English literature primarily. In 2002 she completed a Ph.D. on scepticism and epistemology in The Lady Falkland: Her Life and Elizabeth Cary?s The Tragedy of Mariam. Her research and teaching interests lie in gender and genre in Renaissance and seventeenth-century women?s writing, with particular emphasis on their involvement in drama. Her current research interest focuses on early modern conventual writing. She has published articles on Elizabeth Cary, Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Sidney, Mary Stuart, and Margaret Cavendish.

Christina Wald teaches English literature at the university of Augsburg. She is the author of Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama (Palgrave 2007) and co-editor of several books, most recently The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern (Palgrave 2011). She has just finished a manuscript on spectres of transubstantiation in early modern English prose fiction, which looks at the impact of the Eucharist debate on notions of identity transformation, and currently works on the edition of a special issue of Routledge’s Shakespeare journal on “Medieval Shakespeare.”