Professor Alison Findlay

PhD Supervision Interests

Alison would welcome proposals from potential doctoral students wishing to work on any aspect of Renaissance drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth century
These could include a wide range of projects, from
(i) single-author studies
e.g. Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, Webster, Ford, Brome
(ii) comparativestudies focussing on the work of two or more writers in a genre or topic
(e..g. pastoral drama by Shakespeare, Fletcher and Lady Mary Worth, ideas of the soul in Shakespeare and Donne, domestic tragedy by Heywood, Ford, Midlleton and Elizabeth Cary)
(iii) scholarly editions of plays from the periodby male or female dramatists(with the potential to developa proposal to the Revels Plays)
(iv) aspects of theatre history from the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries up to the present
In connection with her co-direction of the Quaker Project, she would also welcome doctoral proposals from those wishing to study aspects of early quaker writing (either scholarly editing or broader discursive analysis, especially with relation to location).

Current Teaching

Alison Findlay is Professor of Renaissance Drama and Director of the Shakespeare Programme in the Department of English and Creative Writing. She specialises in sixteenth and seventeenth century drama and early modern women's writing.

At Undergraduate level she supervises final year dissertations and teaches on the Part II Shakespeare, Women Writers, and Renaissance and Restoration courses. She lectures on the Part I Introduction to English Literature course and the Part II course Theory and Practice of Criticism.

Alison has supervised postgraduate work at MA, MPhil and PhD levelson Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and early modern women's writing. She would be pleased to discuss proposals for research topics in any of these areasand can be contacted at the Department of English.

Profile

Alison Findlay 's specialist interests are in Shakespearean drama and women's writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is the author of Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) and A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (Oxford, Blackwell, 1999), a book which uses women's writing to analyse mainstream drama by men. She has published numerous essays and articles on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and reviewed books on Shakespeare's life, times and stage for Shakespeare Survey.

Most recently she has completed Women in Shakespeare for the Shakespeare Dictionary Series published by Arden (Bloomsbury Press) and Much Ado About Nothing: a guide to the text and play in performance (2011) Her most recent essays on Shakespeare have been on Much Ado About Nothing (2010, and 2012) and Comedy of Errors (2012). In the past, she has co-edited volumes of essays with Richard Dutton and Richard Wilson, and written for the Shakespeare section of the electronic journal Compass (Blackwell Publishers), Shakespeare Survey, and the Blackwell's Companions to Shakespeare's Comedies, Renaissance Drama and Renaissance Literature. She has spoken at day schools at The Shakespeare Centre in Stratford, to the Royal Shakespeare Company's Summer School, and is an invited member of the International Shakespeare Conference at The Shakespeare Institute. She has been invited to speak on 'Staging Emotion on the Fortune Stage' and to workshop Macbeth with actors Andrew Jarvis and James Evans at the University of Western Australia (Perth) in connection with the Autsralian Centre of Excellence for the Study of the History of Emotions.  

As Director of The Shakespeare Programme Alison co-ordinated research into the Hesketh Collection of rare books. She is a General Editor of the Revels Plays (Manchester University Press) and welcomes proposals for new scholarly editions, from established scholars or recently-completed doctoral students.

Alison has particular interest in feminist approaches to literature and drama in performance, including practical work on dramatic texts. She is co-author of Women and Dramatic Production 1550-1700 (Longman's Medieval and Renaissance Library; Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), and Playing Spaces in Early Women's Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

She co-directs Early Quakerism in the North West with Dr Hilary Hinds and Professor Meg Twycross, focussing on the figure of George Fox and the emergence of Quakerism in the so-called "1652 country". Drawing on the Quaker Collection in the Library, Friends House, and other sources in the Society of Friends, the Quaker Project investigates the way in which early Quakers negotiated and colonised a series of distinctive spatial networks: the landscape, alehouses, marketplaces, mountain-tops, 'steeplehouses', safe houses, and prisons. A dedicated website will interlink newly-edited versions of key texts with biographical details, images, and interactive maps, using GIS.

Videos

Video of The Concealed Fancies

Video of Mary Sidney's The Tragedy of Antonie

Video of Drama Workshop at Hoghton Tower

Video of Pastoral

Click here for a separate page on Renaissance drama at Hoghton Tower, and here for a page on Playing Spaces in Renaissance Drama.

Alison has supervised postgraduate work on Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and early modern women's writing. She would be pleased to discuss proposals for research topics in any of these areas and can be contacted at the Department of English.

Current postgraduate students:

Belal Hamamra 'Speech, silence and gender in Renaissance tragedy'

Rachod Nusen, 'Measure for Measure on Stage and Screen'

Previous postgraduate students:

Vassiliki Markidou, 'Shakespeare and Greece' (PhD)

Peter Stones, 'Monsters in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture' (MA)

Kathleen O'Leary, 'Concepts of the Soul 1590-1630 in Shakespeare and Donne', (PhD)

Hannah Cole, 'Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy and Early Modern Views of History' (MA)

Laura Kenyon, 'Shakespeare, Desire and Guilt'

Stephen Curtis (co-supervision) 'Renaissance Drama and the Poetics of Blood' (phD)

Office Hours

Tuesdays 10-12

• Corpus Research in Early Modern English

  01/10/2011 →
  Summary: We are an interdisciplinary research group which is combining established areas of research excellence at Lancaster University. The emergent synthesis is generating unique methods and approac ... Read more»

• Gender in Cultural Practice

  01/10/2005 →
  This is a research project with colleagues at the University of Groningen (Netherlands) and Lancaster University funded primarily by the Dutch government. It involves 3 interdisciplinary conferences a ... Read more»