search search instagram

Menu
PROSPECTUSGet in touch

About Jesus College/Our community/ People
Dr Amy Lidster

Roles and subjects

Departmental Lecturer in English Language and Literature

Contact

amy.lidster@ell.ox.ac.uk

Academic Background

PhD, MA, BA

I received my first degree in English Literature from the University of London in 2013, an MA in English (Shakespeare in History) from University College London in 2014, and a PhD in English Literature from King’s College London in 2017, which was funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. Before coming to Jesus in 2021, I held a Leverhulme-funded postdoctoral fellowship at KCL for a project called ‘Wartime Shakespeare’. I have also been awarded fellowships from the Society for Renaissance Studies (2018/19), the Huntington Library (2020/21), and the Folger Shakespeare Library (2021/22). I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a Visiting Fellow at King’s College London.

Undergraduate Teaching

I teach English literature from 1550 to 1830 at faculty and college level. At Jesus, I cover the following undergraduate papers for second and third years, as well as offering dissertation supervision:

  • Shakespeare (FHS Paper 1)
  • English Literature 1550-1660 (FHS Paper 3)
  • English Literature 1660-1760 (FHS Paper 4)
  • English Literature 1760-1830 (FHS Paper 5)
  • Epic bridging paper (for the Classics and English degree)
  • Tragedy bridging paper (for the Classics and English degree)

Graduate Teaching

I teach on early modern English literature courses at postgraduate level and supervise MSt dissertations. I convene and teach the MSt C-course ‘Early Modern Women in Print (1550-1700)’.

Research Interests

My principal research interests are in Shakespeare and early modern literature, with an emphasis on performance practices, book history, wartime culture, and the global exchanges and afterlives of texts. My first monograph, Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers Shaping a Genre, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. It offers a reappraisal of the ‘history play’ and draws attention to the assumptions that underlie discussions of the genre, particularly in relation to the critical dominance of Shakespeare’s English histories. My book shows how the publication process and its agents have controlled the survival of drama from the commercial stages and shaped the plays’ presentation in print in ways that both disclose and direct readings of ‘history’.

I am the author of two further monographs. Wartime Shakespeare: Performing Narratives of Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2023) examines how Shakespeare’s plays have been used – and ‘mobilized’ – during periods of war from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. One of the book’s core contributions – achieved by highlighting the fragmented and malleable aims of wartime theatre’s agents of production and reception – is to reassess critical concepts (such as propaganda, patriotism, and commemoration) and to challenge the existence of clear-cut binaries (including pro/anti-war, radical/conservative, revolutionary/reactionary) and how they apply to theatre productions. This monograph accompanies a book collection (Shakespeare at War: A Material History, CUP 2023), co-edited with Sonia Massai, and an exhibition at the National Army Museum, London (running from October 2023 until April 2024). Another monograph – Authorships and Authority in Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts – is forthcoming with Routledge. It examines playbook paratexts as a critical site for negotiating and developing ideas of ‘authorship’ during the period, and argues that print publication propelled a discourse of authorships and a dual emphasis on practices of creation and control.

Publications

Monographs

  1. Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers Shaping a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022)
  2. Wartime Shakespeare: Performing Narratives of Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)
  3. Authorships and Authority in Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts, Studies in Early Modern Authorship (New York: Routledge, forthcoming)

Edited Collections

  1. Shakespeare at War: A Material History, ed. by Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Journal Articles

  1. ‘At the Sign of the Angel: The influence of Andrew Wise on Shakespeare in print’, Shakespeare Survey 71 (2018), 242-54
  2. ‘Shakespeare and the implications of Paratextual Attribution’, Shakespeare Studies, 46 (2018), 150-55
  3. ‘Challenging Monarchical Legacies in Edward III and Henry V’, English: Journal of the English Association, 68:261 (2019), 126-42
  4. ‘“With much labour out of scattered papers”: The Caroline Reprints of Thomas Heywood’s 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody’, Renaissance Drama, 49:2 (2021), 205-28 [*Winner of the Palmer Award in 2023 for Best New Essay]

Chapters in Edited Collections

  1. ‘Publishing King Lear (1608) at the Sign of the Pied Bull’, in Old St Paul’s and Culture, ed. by Shanyn Altman and Jonathan Buckner, Early Modern Literature in History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 293-318
  2. [With Catherine Evans], ‘Resources’, Arden Research Handbook for Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. by Michelle Dowd and Tom Rutter (London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2022), pp. 327-38
  3. ‘Making Sense of Error in Commercial Drama: The case of Edward III’, in Printing and Misprinting: A Companion to Typos and Corrections in Renaissance Europe (1450-1650), ed. by Geri Della Rocca de Candal, Anthony Grafton, and Paolo Sachet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 418-31
  4. ‘Hamlet Mobilized: Political Parody during the Napoleonic Wars’, in Shakespeare at War: A Material History, ed. by Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 38-49
  5. [With Sonia Massai], ‘Introduction: A Material History’, in Shakespeare at War: A Material History, ed. by Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 1-5
  6. ‘Preliminaries and Paratexts’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Authorship, ed. by Rory Loughnane and Will Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
  7. ‘Negotiating Patronage: Nashe and his “toys for private Gentlemen”’, in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Nashe, ed. by Andrew Hadfield, Jennifer Richards, and Kate De Rycker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

Critical Editions

  1. The Reign of King Edward III, ed. by Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai, Internet Shakespeare Editions/Linked Early Modern Drama Online [old-spelling edition, modern edition, and textual introduction are published on ISE; full critical edition is forthcoming with LEMDO]
  2. Henry VI: Part 1, introduction by Amy Lidster, ed. by New Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025)

Other Publications

  1. Review of Erin McCarthy, Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) in The Spenser Review (Fall 2021)
  2. ‘Shakespeare and War’, in Oxford Bibliographies in British and Irish Literature, ed. by Andrew Hadfield. (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

Links

See also Dr Lidster’s personal academic website and departmental profile.

Subject notes for courses taught at Jesus College: