We are delighted to announce that Dr Amy Lidster will be joining Jesus College and the University of Oxford in October as a Departmental Lecturer and Tutor in English Language and Literature.

For the next three years Amy will be covering the role of Paulina Kewes, Professor of English Literature and Helen Morag Fellow and Tutor here at Jesus College, while she undertakes a three-year Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2021 – 24).

Amy received her PhD in Early Modern English Literature from King’s College London (KCL) in 2018. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at KCL on a Leverhulme-funded project called Wartime Shakespeare.

 

She has been awarded fellowships from the Society for Renaissance Studies (as a 2018/19 Postdoctoral Fellow), the Huntington Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, and was selected as a Next Generation Plenary speaker at the Shakespeare Association of America in 2017. Amy has taught at KCL, Shakespeare’s Globe, the University of Roehampton, and Brunel University.

Amy’s principal research interests are in early modern drama, book history, and historical culture. Her first book, Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers Shaping A Genre, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. It offers a reappraisal of the ‘history play’ by demonstrating how the publication process and its agents have helped to define, develop, and ‘read’ the genre. Amy’s work has also been published widely in edited collections and journals, including Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Studies, Renaissance Drama, English: Journal of the English Association, and Old St Paul’s and Culture (ed. by Shanyn Altman and Jonathan Buckner; Palgrave, forthcoming 2021).

Amy’s ongoing research includes two new monograph projects. Wartime Shakespeare: Performing Narratives of Conflict derives from her current Leverhulme position and considers how Shakespeare has been used in performance to inform and mobilize public opinion during periods of war from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. This book will be accompanied by a book collection (Shakespeare at War: A Material History, CUP 2023), co-edited with Sonia Massai, and an exhibition at the National Army Museum. Another monograph – Authorships and Authority in Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts – 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.

Of her new role, Amy says, “I am thrilled to be joining Jesus College and the University of Oxford, and am looking forward to working with its brilliant students and staff. In particular, I’m delighted to be coming to Jesus at such an exciting time – as the College celebrates its 450^th anniversary, opens its new Northgate development and Digital Hub, and launches the Jesus College Shakespeare Project. I feel privileged to be part of this community and am excited to see what the next few years have in store.”