• • Home
  • Undergraduate Study
• • Postgrad English
  • Postgrad Creative Writing
• • Research
  • Staff
• • News & Events
  • Contact Us
• • Resources for Current Students

Professor Alison Findlay

Professor of Renaissance Drama, Director of the Shakespeare Programme

Degree: BA English and Comparative Literature (York) MA Shakespeare Studies (The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham) PhD (The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham) PGCE, English and Drama (University of Leeds)

Current Teaching

Alison Findlay is Professor of Renaissance Dramain 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 andteaches 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 atMA, 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.

Research Interests

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 essays and articles on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and reviewed books on Shakespeare's life, times and stage for Shakespeare Survey.

She is currently completingWomen in Shakespeare for the Shakespeare Dictionary Series to be published by Continuum Press. Her most recent essays on Shakespeare have been onRichard II and Mary, Queen of Scots (2006), on As You Like It (2006),and All's Well That Ends Well (2007). 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 theInternational Shakespeare Conference at The Shakespeare Institute. She recently attended the World Shakespeare Congress (2006), British Shakespeare Association Conference (2007) and will becontributing to a seminar on 'Shakespeare at the Court' at the Shakespeare Association ofAmerica (2008).

As Director of The Shakespeare Programme Alison and has recently co-ordinated research into the Hesketh Collection of rare books, including First Folios by Shakespeare and Jonson, held in the University Library. 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. (See videos belowand on Research pages for details). She co-directeda research project on early modern women's drama (1994-2004) involving productions of plays as well as publications. She is co-author of Women and Dramatic Production 1550-1700 (Longman's Medieval and Renaissance Library; Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), and has recently published Playing Spaces in Early Women's Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2006). She now 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:

Kathleen O'Leary, 'Concepts of the Soul 1590-1630', M.Phil./Ph.D.,

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'

Potential Doctoral Proposals

Alison would welcome proposals from potential doctoral students wishing to work on any aspect ofRenaissance 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).

Other Interests and Hobbies

Alison plays the clarsach (small harp) and has an interest in folk music and song.

Associated Keywords: Dramaturgy, Early modern culture, Early modern women's writing, Early modern writing, Feminist perspectives, Gender, George Fox, Literature, Literature and gender, Manuscripts, Performance, Renaissance drama, Renaissance literature, Ritual studies, Seventeenth century, Seventeenth-century literature, Seventeenth-century Quakers, Shakespeare, Sixteenth-century culture, Sixteenth-century literature

View all research activities, ePrints, news and events associated with Alison Findlay.

«Back