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Staff Profile

Dr Emma Whipday

Senior Lecturer

Background

Role in the School

I am Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature, and was recently the Widening Participation Lead for English Literature and Creative Writing. I co-run the Newcastle University Performance Research Network. I am on maternity leave until July 2025.

Expertise Summary

I recently completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, researching brother-sister relationships on the early modern stage. I work on early modern drama, focusing on genre, theatricality, 'practice as research', familial and service relationships, and domestic and sexual violence (for more information, see the 'Research' tab). 

I would be happy to hear from prospective PhD students interested in working on Shakespeare and/or early modern drama, particularly topics related to domesticity, women's voices and agency, familial and gendered hierarchies, witchcraft, desire and consent, early modern playhouse culture, ballads and street literature, and practice as research.

Biography

After growing up in the North East, I moved to Nottinghamshire, where I was educated at my local comprehensive: the Minster School in Southwell. I studied English Language and Literature at Oxford as an undergraduate, before studying for an MA in 'English: Shakespeare in History', and a PhD on Shakespeare and domestic tragedy, at UCL. I have taught at Shakespeare's Globe, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, King's College London, UCL, and Brasenose College, Oxford. I began my Leverhulme fellowship at UCL, before taking up my position as Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Newcastle.


Research

Research Interests

I am interested in family, gender, and power on the early modern stage, and in early modern culture more broadly. My research focuses on the political significance of household dynamics; the generic expectations that shape texts; and the interplay between performers, playing spaces and audiences on the early modern stage and street. I have published on early modern 'true crime' news pamphlets, staging the home in domestic tragedy, household work in Macbeth and Othello, recent productions of early modern plays, and performance practice as research. My monograph Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies, which explores domestic violence in Shakespeare's plays, domestic tragedies, and early modern popular culture, is published by Cambridge University Press (2019), and is co-winner of the Shakespeare's Globe Book Award 2020. My essay collection Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience, and Performance, co-edited with Simon Smith, is published by Cambridge University Press (2022). My mini-book Teaching Shakespeare and His Sisters: An Embodied Approach (Cambridge UP, 2023) offers a hands-on, practical guide to teaching Shakespeare (and early modern women's writing, creativity, and performance) through our bodies.

Current Work

My current book project, Subordinate Roles, explores the cultural importance of the brother-sister relationship, and how this relationship intersects with issues of patriarchal power, female agency, domestic authority, and the place of the unmarried woman in early modern society. It investigates the ways in which the drama of the period interrogates the familial, social, and political implications of the brother-sister bond, which is barely mentioned in the conduct literature, but is obsessively represented onstage.

I am also working on an ongoing project on the role of 'practice as research' as an approach to early modern drama, which involves collaborating with external organisations and creative practitioners to explore the possibilities of staging neglected early modern plays, and using 'verbatim theatre' techniques to investigate 'lost' plays, voices, and experiences. This project also builds on, and informs, my creative work as a playwright.

I am writing the introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.

Performance Research Network

Supported by a Pioneers award from Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute and Newcastle University Institute for Creative Arts Practice, I co-run the 'Performance Research Network' with Ruth Raynor (Urban Planning). This is an interdisciplinary group drawing together thinkers and doers from across Newcastle University: we research performance; conduct research through performance; and research to create performance. You can read more here: https://research.ncl.ac.uk/performance/

Funding/Awards

I am an AHRC BBC New Generation Thinker 2022.

I was nominated for a Newcastle University 'TEA' Teaching Award in 2021 and 2022.

My online video series 'Stay at Home Shakespeare' won a Renaissance Society of America award for 'Innovative Online Teaching' (2022).

My book Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies is co-winner of the Shakespeare's Globe Book Award 2020.

My project on brother-sister relationships on the early modern stage was funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.

My play The Defamation of Cicely Lee is a 2019 winner of the American Shakespeare Center's 'Shakespeare's New Contemporaries' award, and will be staged at the ASC's Blackfriars Playhouse in May 2020.

I received an award from the UCL Dean's Fund to direct a staged reading of Paradise Lost, adapted by Dr Eric Langley and co-directed with Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for Shakespeare's Glob in May 2018.

My play Shakespeare's Sister (Samuel French, 2016), which draws on my research on early modern family dynamics, won the Theatre Royal Haymarket Masterclass 'Pitch Your Play' Award 2015.

I was nominated for a King's Teaching Award at King's College London (2015-2016), and I am a Fellow of the HEA.

Teaching

In 2024-5, I am on maternity leave.


In 2023-4, I taught on:

Women on Trial: Gender, Power and Performance in Early Modern Culture (Stage 3, module convenor)

Renaissance Bodies (stage 2; module convenor)

Independent Research Project (stage 2)

Introduction to Literary Studies 2 (stage 1)


Publications