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2026 PLENARY SPEAKERS
A defining feature of BritGrad is its programme of plenary lectures delivered by field-leading experts - scholars, directors, actors, and practitioners whose work shapes contemporary Shakespeare and Renaissance studies. Previous speakers include Prof. Farah Karim-Cooper, Sir Gregory Doran, Prof. Simon Palfrey, Erica Whyman OBE, Dr. Chris Laoutaris, Prof. Laurie Maguire, Dr. Andy Kesson, Dr. Paul Edmondson, Dr. Paul Prescott, and many others.
We are so excited to be joined at BritGrad 2026 by so many renowned academics and experts. Read below for more information on our brilliant speakers, including bios and abstracts.
Dr. Erin Sullivan
Dr. Valentina Finger
Dr. Matthieu Chapman
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Dr. Rebecca Yearling
Dr. Kelsey Ridge
Arthur Hughes
Dr Erin Sullivan
Dr Erin Sullivan is Reader in Shakespeare at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. Her recent work has focused on Shakespeare, digital culture, and adaptation. She was the chair of Britgrad in 2005.
Welcome
In this short talk, Dr Sullivan will welcome delegates to the Shakespeare Institute and provide a short history of Britgrad. She will then offer some opening thoughts on the conference theme, linking them to what she calls 'The Microscopic Gaze' in her book Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice (Palgrave, 2022).
Dr Valentina Finger
Dr. Valentina Finger is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in English literature at Ludwig Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich. She first studied Fashion Journalism and Communication, followed by Comparative Literature in Munich and at King's College London. Her doctoral dissertation, 'Mirrors in Shakespeare and Early Modern English Drama: Power, Gender and the Magic of the Theatre', was published with Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare (Arden Studies in Early Modern Drama) in February 2026. In her current postdoctoral project, she explores the role of dress in the ideal world designs suggested in utopian prose fiction, from its early modern genrefication beginning with Thomas More through literary history. Among her further research interests are sartorial and cosmetic cultures in literature and beyond.
Shakespeare Through the Telescope: Monarchs, Magi, and What They See in Mirrors
Mirrors changed the scopic regime of early modernity. Like the rise of the playhouse, the increasing availability of specular tools of variable materials and quality produced a new medium for viewing oneself and the world. More than thirty plays staged in England in the decades around 1600 feature mirrors as stage props, while the language of virtually every other play staged in that era makes use of some kind of mirror imagery. This keynote first explores the mirrors employed in the power struggle surrounding Shakespeare's monarchs Richard II and Macbeth in the plays of their names. It illustrates how the narrative tradition of 'imperial mirrors' (prognostic or telescopic glasses legendarily relied on by rulers since antiquity) found its way onto the stage, where the mirrors' effects are twisted to challenge ideas of sovereign omnipotence. Further discussing two non-Shakespearean comedies, Ben Jonson's 'The Alchemist' and Thomas Middleton's 'A Game at Chess', it demonstrates how changing perspectives on (natural) magic in the early seventeenth century affected the presence of 'magic' mirrors on stage. It closes by suggesting a congeneric relationship between the early modern mirror and the theatre.
Dr Matthieu Chapman
Matthieu Chapman is an Associate Professor of Theatre at the State University of New York at New Paltz and the Literary Director of NY Classical Theatre. His creative writing and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Pithead Chapel, Prose Online, Beyond Words, and the Huffington Post. His research focuses on ontological structures of blackness in the Early Modern World and how they exist in a continuum with today. He is the author of three books: Shattered: Fragments of a Black Life (WVU Press 2023); Antiblack Racism in Early Modern English Drama: “The Other Other” (Routledge 2016); and most recently, Shakespeare and Antiblack World-Making (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025). He is the co-editor along with Anna Wainwright of Teaching Race in the Early Modern World: A Classroom Guide (ACMRS Press, 2023). He has also published articles in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Theatre Topics, Shakespeare, Literature Compass, TheatreForum, Theatre History Studies and Early Theatre, and he has chapters in Race and/as Affect in Early Modern England (edited by Carol Mejia-LaPerle) and Shakespeare and Atrocity.
“Who Wants to Be Taken Seriously?”
This in-conversation session with Matthieu Chapman will explore questions of form, voice, authority, and belonging within Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies. Moving through Chapman’s career trajectory - from his first experiences of Shakespeare to his current work across academic scholarship, memoir, theatre, and literary prose - the discussion will consider how traditional academic structures shape not only what kinds of knowledge are
valued, but also who is permitted to produce it, and in what forms.
Weaving questions and conversation with extracts from Chapman’s work, the discussion will examine his exploration of ontological structures of blackness, Afropessimism and his critique of the “universal” human in Shakespeare. The session will also consider his movement away from conventional academic forms toward writing which blends memoir, theory, performance, film scripts, and literary criticism. It will ask that possibilities are opened when autobiography, lived experience, and creative practices are brought into ‘academic’ work - especially in a moment when many early career researchers are confronting uncertainty about the future of the field and their place within it. Ultimately, the conversation asks what it means to create space for new voices and
methodologies within a field historically shaped by exclusionary traditions.
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Dr Rebecca Yearling
Dr Rebecca Yearling is Senior Lecturer in English at Keele University. Her research focuses upon audience response to Renaissance drama: her first monograph, 'Ben Jonson, John Marston and Early Modern Drama: Satire and the Audience' was published by Palgrave in 2016, and her most recent book, 'Shakespeare's Violence and the Early Modern Spectator' came out with Bloomsbury Arden in 2026. She is currently working on a new project on what it means to modernise Shakespeare in performance
Watching Shakespeare's Violence: Then and Now
How did Shakespeare's original audiences respond to the violence of his plays? What attraction or interest might scenes of violence have had for early modern spectators, and how might such scenes continue to resonate for us today? This paper explores both the challenges and the possibilities of reconstructing early audience responses, via a mixed methodology that explores the role played by contemporary discourses surrounding violence, morality,
empathy and judgement, as well as the theatrical conventions of the time and modern psychological theories about the origin and practical operation of the emotions. It also brings this issue into the 21st century, looking at the extent to which the English Renaissance debates surrounding theatrical violence and
its value have continued into our own time. It ultimately makes the case that fictional violence is valuable to audiences because it tells us about ourselves: what kinds of suffering we can bear (or even enjoy) watching, what kinds we cannot, and the grounds on which we make such distinctions in theatre.
Dr Kelsey Ridge
Kelsey Ridge is an adjunct at Alvernia University. She earned her PhD in Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. She is the author of Shakespeare's Military Spouses and Twenty-First-Century Warfare (Routledge 2021), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Shakespeare (Routledge 2025), and Shakespeare and Trauma Theory (Arden 2026).
“take no note of him, but let him go”: Unequal surveillance in Much Ado About Nothing
It is frequently observed that Much Ado is a play about noting. Characters are observed, remarked, and gossiped about. This noting acts as a form of surveillance. However, the whos and hows of this noting are not equally distributed. Don John, Borachio, and Conrade, despite their recent antagonism to the regime, are not to surveillance. Indeed, although Don John complains of curtailments on his liberty, he has remarkable ability to control if and how he is noted. In contrast, Beatrice and especially Hero are much marked by others. When Hero is accused of sexual infidelity, the status of the surveillance on her is repeatedly invoked by accusers and defenders. Adaptations have often steered into this noting/surveillance element in the text. How these characters are surveilled speaks to the nature of Messinan civil society and our society as readers and adapters.
Arthur Hughes
Arthur Hughes is a renowned British actor and performer. He graudated from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in 2013, leaving with the Carleton Hobbs radio award and a stint on the BBC Radio Drama Company. He has performed on various stages in London and around the country, including the NT, Crucible, Donmar, Almeida, Regents Park, The Globe, and the RSC for the '22 production of Richard III (Critics Choice Award). Screen includes work on BBC (Then Barbara Met Alan, The Jetty), ITV (Gone), C4 (Mincemeat), Netflix (The Innocents), Apple (Criminal Record), Disney (Shardlake).
Playing Richard III and Disability in Shakespeare
This talk will offer an insight into my time playing Richard III in the 2022 RSC production, notable for being the first production at the RSC with a disabled actor to play the infamous king. Focussing on my time in Stratford, but also on the world Richard inhabits as a disabled man; the pressures and influences of a society that reviles and rejects him, and how that can shape a persons views, and ultimately their conscience.
2023 PLENARY SPEAKERS
Dr Will Tosh
Will Tosh is Head of Research at Shakespeare’s Globe, London. He teaches, writes about, and researches the literature and culture of Shakespeare’s England, and he leads the Globe’s scholarly research mission. Will’s work at the Globe includes dramaturgy, new writing development and public engagement in person, in the media and online. He is the author of Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare’s England, which revealed the intimate social circle of the Elizabethan spy Anthony Bacon. Will is currently working on a book called Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, to be published with Sceptre in 2024.
Carla Della Gatta
Carla Della Gatta is Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University. She is a theatre historian and performance theorist who examines ethnic and bilingual theatre through dramaturgy and aurality. She built and maintains the only archive of Latinx theatrical adaptation, LatinxShakespeares.Org. She is author of Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater (2023) and co-editor of Shakespeare and Latinidad (2021). She received the J Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize from the Shakespeare Association of America, and she has received fellowships and awards from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Woodrow Wilson Foundation (now Citizens and Scholars), the New York Public Library, and more. She is on the Advisory Board for the Latinx Theatre Commons, and she is the Digital Humanities Editor for The Fornés Institute. She serves on the editorial boards of journals Shakespeare Survey and for the Arden series on Shakespeare and Social Justice.
Dr Rowan Mackenzie
Rowan Mackenzie is both practitioner and academic, working with specialised communities. Her doctoral research used spatial theory as a framework to examine global theatre practices with incarcerated people and people with mental health issues, learning disabilities and experience of homelessness. She is founder and Artistic Director of Shakespeare UnBard, which facilitates collaborative theatre companies in a number of UK prisons, and Co-Chair of the Shakespeare Beyond Borders Alliance. She is the recipient of many national and international awards for her work, including the prestigious Butler Trust award. She has published numerous chapters and essays on Shakespeare within prisons, Shakespeare with learning-disabled actors and the heterotopic potential of applied theatre. Her monograph Creating Space for Shakespeare was published by Bloomsbury Arden in March 2023.
Dr Chris Laoutaris
Dr Chris Laoutaris is a biographer, historian, poet, Shakespeare scholar and Associate Professor at The Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham). He is the author of Shakespeare's Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio. In addition to academic publications, he has published Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe. He is a co-editor of Anne-thology: Poems Re-Presenting Anne Shakespeare. Laoutaris has written for the Financial Times Sunday Express, among others. His media work includes BBC1's The One Show, BBC3's Front Row, among others. He is Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Shakespeare Beyond Borders Alliance and Co-Founder of the EQUALityShakespeare initiative.
Lauren Jansen-Parkes
Lauren is Community Engagement and Volunteer Officer for ‘Everything to Everybody”, aNHLF funded collaboration between the University of Birmingham and Birmingham CityCouncil which aims to raise awareness of, restore and celebrated the BirminghamShakespeare Collection. She holds an MA in Staging Shakespeare from the University ofExeter, and regularly runs workshops for schools and educational groups exploring EarlyModern theatre practice. She has worked as a script editor and dramaturg, and her feministreworking of the history plays Margaret of Anjou was produced by California based theatrecompany, ‘Those Women’, in 2016. When not working in community libraries, she hasworked as a facilitator and researcher with arts and community organisations in Birmingham and across the UK, focusing on history, spirituality, and of course, Shakespeare!
Michelle Lynch
Michelle Lynch (she/her/hers) is a DC-based dramaturg and playwright. While completing her BA in Paris and her Master of Letters in Playwriting and Dramaturgy at the University of Glasgow, she balanced her studies with work on international theatre festivals. Since moving to Washington, DC she has worked as a dramaturg with Adventure Theatre, 4615 Theatre, The Kennedy Center, and District Dramatists. Two of Michelle’s original plays, From Cinders To Ella and Willow’s Bend, were commissioned in recent years by Adventure Theatre. Michelle is driven by a passion for collaborative and inclusive new works creation, and the DMV area has been the dream environment for that process. Michelle currently works as the Artistic Associate to Karen Ann Daniels at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where she supports all production and programming processes.
Contact
Mason Croft, Church Street
Stratford-Upon-Avon, Warickshire
United Kingdom, CV37 6HP
