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Plenary Interview: Dr. Kelsey Ridge.
- Paige Calvert
- Jun 8
- 9 min read
Thanks for joining the BritGrad Blog for our interview introduction with Dr. Kelsey Ridge. Dr. Ridge is currently an adjunct at Alvernia University. She is an alum of the Shakespeare Institute and 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). I first met through the connection of our undergraduate alma mater Wellesley College where we both were members of the same academic society. Read below to find out more about that group, a teaser of Kelsey’s Plenary topic, the stereotypes of dramaturgs, and The Hunger Games below!
Paige Calvert (PC): Hi, Dr. Ridge, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today as a little teaser for our BritGrad attendees. You are a former BritGrad committee member, yes?
Kelsey Ridge (KR): Yes, can I send a little love to whoever is Treasurer this year? Because it is a necessary, if slightly thankless, position. [laughter]
PC: This is my first time on the committee, and I'm really enjoying it! I’m still figuring out how to balance being the Registrar and my general PhD workload, but it’s been a fun challenge as I’m sure you can imagine!
For our attendees, could you briefly outline your academic trajectory and your specific
areas of expertise?
KR: So, since my time at the Institute, I've worked primarily in trauma in early modern
literature. I’m looking at how we identify trauma in that period, the ways that subsequent audiences have related to those experiences and looked at that as an element of the longer continuity of the human experience. And I've focused primarily on post-traumatic stress disorder and on war-related trauma, but it's really a much broader field in that sense.
PC: That's really interesting! How has our theme this year, which is Shakespeare Under the Microscope: Surveillance, Observation, and Forensic Analysis, intersected with your research interests, and potentially what you might be presenting for us this summer?
KR: When I was at the Institute, I joked a lot with my advisor and some of my friends about Much Ado About Nothing as a play is kind of like the Fawlty Towers episode, “The Germans” (1975). There's a running gag that the British hotel is about to have German guests and the hotelier keeps telling people not to mention the war. You have a postconflict society that dedicates a lot of their emotional bandwidth to pretending they're not a post-conflict society. Everything is fine and everything is funny. And so I'm trying to bring some of that energy and combine it with our modern sense of social observation as a form of surveillance. I plan to look at how the characters in Much Ado constantly observe each other.
PC: That's really cool. Much Ado is one of my favorite plays. And I think it sometimes gets put into a category of being solely a comedy, but there's a lot of really intense, tragic elements. There is also clearly a surveillance state in operation in the play, and this idea of overhearing and mishearing and then that misinformation being spread.
KR: I don't want to say it's entirely Kenneth Branagh's fault, but maybe it's entirely
Kenneth Branagh's fault? [laughter] I think people these days think about Much Ado like a countryside comedy, as more of a green world text, and it's not. It's much more of a city text in that sense, and with that comes that darker element, as well as some of the context of surveillance and social pressure.
PC: Do you have a “hear-me-out" Shakespeare play or moment that you feel deserves
more love and attention?
KR: Okay, so I'm going to take a twofer here, because my favorite Shakespeare play, is unreasonably a “hear-me-out” play. It's completely unfair! Cymbeline. That play is spun gold. That is the greatest hits album of Shakespeare plays, and everyone looks at it like it's this ugly stepchild, like it's completely incomprehensible. It very much works, and it's a culmination of a lot of themes and ideas that are interesting . Everyone just looks at me and goes, how am I supposed to understand this? I don't know, you understand all the other ones? [laughter]
I will admit I've seen probably 5 productions of Cymbeline? And, my conclusion was that you have to steer into the fantasy and fairytale elements...Just let the play with a wicked stepmother and a potion that makes you fall unconscious, and disappearing twins be the fantastical fantasy piece.
PC: Lean into the absurd, love that! I wanted to delve a little bit into one of our personal connections, which is the Wellesley College Shakespeare Society. I don't know about you, but Shakes is why I want to do what we do. Is there a defining moment from your time in Shakes that you look back on with fondness?
KR: See, I'm torn, because I was going to say Shakes is where I first encountered the play Cymbeline. But we took a class with Yu Jin Ko, on Henry IV Part 1, and about a third of the class was Shakers, and I was reading it, and I said, “I think Hotspur has PTSD. I think this is what his wife is saying.” And then the next semester, Shakes performed Henry IV Part 1 and I was cast as Kate Percy, Hotspur's wife, and I got to give that speech. And that's when I seared into that as an approach to the character. We joke that Hilary Gross (the director) ruined several lives, because in the wake of this production, our Owen Glendower went on to get a degree in medieval Welsh literature. I got a PhD in Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute and wrote a book on post-traumatic stress disorder in Shakespeare, and our Hal and our Hotspur got married!
PC: There’s so many memories with Shakes! I feel very lucky to reconnect with you
through all of these different touch points we’ve managed to share. Long live Shakes and Sonnet LXV! I've read a bit that you sometimes dramaturg for opera and theater. How did you get into this, and what has been one of the more rewarding aspects of it?
KR: I definitely view play texts when I'm encountering them not only as books or elements of poetry, but as things that are meant to be performed. They're meant to have a life where an actor says them, and an audience hears them. Being involved in productions like that is very enriching, in my view, and it's something I think gets left by the wayside in a lot of academic research.
There's a bit of a reputation of the dramaturg. As A.J. Hartley puts it, “the Shakespeare police” or the bully in the room who tells you not to do things. But I prefer to think of it as being a voice for the text, a way of saying, “This is an option that you have that the text is presenting you with. Do you want to explore this?” Or, “If you cut that speech, here's the thing that you would be sacrificing”. Or sometimes, “If that's the idea you want, you have to cut this bit of the script that's going to nakedly contradict you, so you can't have the actor say that and then have this other thing”.
PC: That’s a really interesting perspective on straddling both the academic and practical worlds. Are there any recent publications or works in progress you would like us to highlight? Can you give us some insight into the process involved in developing any of these pieces?
KR: I will say one piece of advice that I think is underrated in literature is that we have a lot of pressure in literature as academia to write solo-authored monographs. Because we treat that like that's the real pinnacle of achievement. But there's a lot more to be said for say, journal articles or things in a collection where you're part of a bigger story, or where you're collaborating with other people on an idea. Maybe things should only be a book if you had a book's amount of stuff to say. Sometimes you're thinking, I don't know if I really need a whole book on this.
PC: I think it's really important to have a real-life sense of what it is to be in academia right now. I think in my head, because I'm in my second year of my PhD, at the end of this is a book that comes together out of my thesis. And to hear that you don't have to have a book's worth of ideas all the time, that it is possible to write smaller pieces like journal articles, reviews, or collaborative ideas that myself and a colleague could pursue together is a really valuable point of view!
KR: I think we undersell collaboration in a lot of academia, and it's interesting, because, drama is inherently a collaborative enterprise. You can have one actor doing it alone, but that actor needs the lights to come on, and they need there to be an audience. So, they're definitely not alone. I think there is perhaps a lot more to be said for collaborative work.
PC: Staying with this line of advice, we have a lot of MA and PhD students who are either on the committee or who are presenting as delegates. Is there something that you wish you knew, in the throes of writing a thesis?
KR: I think one thing people don't think about is when you turn it in. You want to mark the occasion in some way. I turned mine in in April and then I went to a conference to talk about the movie Heathers and not talk about my research. And that, for me, is like a little treat. I can talk about fun things! But it's good to have something that you do at that point to mark the occasion, or to give yourself a little treat. What people don't talk about is a lot of people get really sad right after they finish, or right after they turn it in, because they were doing this big thing, and they put so much of themselves into it. It's really important, I don't want to diminish that, but you want to reward yourself for doing it! And so, I do think it is worth thinking, what is the thing you're going to do? Do you plan to go out for dinner with all of your friends after you turn it in? Do you go see a show at the RST? What is the thing you're going to do to mark the milestones in your process.
PC: You heard it here first folks, Dr. Kelsey Ridge is in favor of a little treat when you
deserve it! What is something that has been surprising or a formative influence on your career development?
KR: I will say, a lot of advice I got from people was people saying, “Oh, teach a class on what your book is about!” Try to sync up your research and your teaching. And I was like, okay, I researched trauma, and I think if I taught a whole class on this, my students would walk into the woods and never talk to me again! [laughter] And I instead had a lot of joy in teaching a course on British detective fiction that I call, “How to Get Away with Murder.”
PC: Incredible.
KR: And I would like to speak briefly on the benefits of having something that is fun and pleasurable, separate from your research, or having hobbies or interests outside of your immediate research sphere. It's almost like the academic equivalent of, don't monetize every single one of your hobbies. Don't try to turn every single one of your hobbies into a monograph!...I had a student come up to me after class and say that my class on Coriolanus had really enriched her understanding of The Hunger Games. And I had not read the prequels, and so I was like, “Oh, cool, I'm really glad that's working out for you!” I went home and realized it’s Coriolanus Snow?
PC: Suzanne Collins wouldn't have picked a wild name like Coriolanus without potentially wanting us to think about Shakespeare's Coriolanus.
KR: Yeah, and I think Volumnia is in the prequels too, and I was like, okay, this is signaling a lot of things now. We are leaning in!
PC: Do you have any advice for our delegates who will be presenting or our auditors who will be sitig in the audience?
KR: I will admit, when I'm in the audience, I try to be very cognizant of trying to make sure that everyone on the panel receives a question. So sometimes if someone on the panel doesn't get a question, as an audience member, I'm thinking, I have to think of something. This person needs a question. This person deserves a question. One of the questions I once heard someone ask, that I thought was a great question, was, “What left on the cutting room floor? Was there something you had to cut for time that you wish you had time to talk about?”
PC: That's a great question, and I think to our BritGrad attendees, you should put that one in your back pocket in case you need it in a panel that you attend! I think I will wrap it up there, but thank you, Kelsey, for this interview!
KR: Thank you for interviewing me, it was great to see you again.
Thanks for taking the time to check out my conversation with Dr. Kelsey Ridge. I know I’m so looking forward to hearing her Plenary on Much Ado and the world of surveillance. I hope to see you there!
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