Early Modern Studies
In the wide-ranging field of Early Modern Studies, we explore the literature and culture of early modern Britain. The period had a profound and lasting impact on British history, not only politically with the Reformation, the ‘Golden Age’ under Elizabeth I and the unification of the English and Scottish crowns, but also culturally with influential works by artists such as William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, and Ben Johnson, as well as the establishment of a commercial theatre industry in London. Our research projects examine early modern British literature in its diverse contemporary contexts, but also chart the implicit and explicit cultural traces of the period in the 21st century.
The Reformation of Romance: The Eucharist, Disguise, and Foreign Fashion in Early Modern Prose Fiction
Christina Wald’s second monograph takes a fresh look at the abundant scenarios of disguise in early modern prose fiction and suggests reading them in the light of the contemporary religio-political developments. More specifically, it argues that Elizabethan narratives adopt aspects of the heated Eucharist debate during the Reformation, including officially renounced notions like transubstantiation, to negotiate culturally pressing concerns regarding identity change. Narratives which are discussed in detail are William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, Robert Greene’s Pandosto and Menaphon, Philip Sidney’s Old and New Arcadia, and Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynd and A Margarite of America, George Gascoigne’s Steele Glas, John Lyly’s Euphues: An Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and his England, Barnabe Riche’s Farewell, Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller.
Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV
In her new monograph, Christina Wald examines how Shakespeare’s plays resurface in current complex TV series, bringing together plays as diverse as The Tempest and Coriolanus with serial TV dramas like Westworld and Homeland. The comparative readings ask what new insights the twenty-first-century remediations may grant us into Shakespeare’s texts and, vice versa, how Shakespearean returns help us understand topical concerns negotiated in the series, such as artificial intelligence, the safeguarding of democracy, terrorism, and postcolonial justice. The dramaturgical seriality typical of complex TV allows insights into the seriality Shakespeare employed in structuring his plays. Discussing a broad spectrum of adaptational constellations and establishing key characteristics of the new adaptational aggregate of serial Shakespeare, the study seeks to initiate a dialogue between Shakespeare studies, adaptation studies, and TV studies.
Christina Wald, Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV (publisher's website)
Dramaturgies of Love in Romeo and Juliet: Word – Music – Dance
In his doctoral research project, Jonas Kellermann explores the dramaturgical conception of unspeakable love in Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy Romeo and Juliet. Reassessing the play in light of the recent surge of affect theory, he reads the story of the star-crossed lovers as a tragedy of affective community in which the self-proclaimed unspeakability of the lovers’ emotion nevertheless becomes verbally manifest in their amorous discourse. This complex negotiation on the affective (in)expressiveness of language has made the play an unparalleled source material for musical and choreographic adaptations by artists ranging from romantic composers such as Hector Berlioz to post-modern choreographers such as Sasha Waltz. This project thus brings together the thriving field of early modern emotion studies with the intermedial discourses on Shakespeare, music, and dance.
Jonas Kellermann, "Dramaturgies of Love in Romeo and Juliet." (publishers website)
Unprecedented Paths Beyond Europe: British Female Travel Writing, 1680 to 1780
Jasmin Bieber’s doctoral research project explores the rise of British female travel writing in the later early modern period and its significance for the (de)construction of a decidedly Western cultural identity of Europe. Taking into account authors such as Aphra Behn, Lady Mary Montagu, and Lady Elizabeth Craven, the project focusses exclusively on processes of female identity formation to engage with a variety of research questions: With what kind of strategies do the emerging female narrators of travel writing in the period re-discover and relate to ‘foreign’ cultural identities? What do these individual negotiations of identity (re-)formation tell us about the formation British, (continental) European, and non-European identities in the 17th and 18th century? And do these encounters eventually destabilize or rather reinforce the boundaries, spatial and cultural, between the self and the other?