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Staff Profile

Dr Emma Whipday

Senior Lecturer

  • Personal Website:
Background

Role in the School

I am Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature, and I co-run the .


Expertise Summary

I work on early modern drama, focusing on non-normative families, home, genre, theatricality, and domestic and sexual violence (for more information, see the 'Research' tab). 


I would be happy to hear from prospective PhD students interested in working on Shakespeare and/or early modern drama, particularly topics related to family, domesticity, women's voices and agency, witchcraft, desire and consent, early modern playhouse culture, ballads and street literature, and practice as research/creative practice.


Biography

After growing up in the North East, I moved to Nottinghamshire, where I was educated at my local comprehensive: the Minster School in Southwell. I studied English Language and Literature at Oxford as an undergraduate, before studying for an MA in 'English: Shakespeare in History', and a PhD on Shakespeare and domestic tragedy, at UCL. I have taught at Shakespeare's Globe, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, King's College London, UCL, and Brasenose College, Oxford. I was also a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at UCL, working on the brother-sister relationship on the early modern stage; I completed this fellowship at 缅北禁地 before taking up my position as Lecturer.


Research

Research Interests

I am interested in family, gender, and power on the early modern stage, and in early modern culture more broadly. My research focuses on the political significance of household dynamics; the generic expectations that shape texts; and the interplay between performers, playing spaces and audiences on the early modern stage and street. I have published on early modern 'true crime' news pamphlets, staging the home in domestic tragedy, household work in Macbeth and Othello, recent productions of early modern plays, and performance practice as research. My monograph Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies, which explores domestic violence in Shakespeare's plays, domestic tragedies, and early modern popular culture, is published by Cambridge University Press (2019), and is co-winner of the Shakespeare's Globe Book Award 2020. I have edited two essay collections: Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience, and Performance, co-edited with Simon Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Shakespeare/Play (Arden Shakespeare, 2025). My mini-book Teaching Shakespeare and His Sisters: An Embodied Approach (Cambridge UP, 2023) offers a hands-on, practical guide to teaching Shakespeare – and early modern women's writing, creativity, and performance – through our bodies. I wrote the introduction to the new Oxford World's Classics Measure for Measure.


Current Work

My current book project, Kin: An Intimate History of the Family, explores how the idealisation of the nuclear family in Elizabethan England both demonised and marginalised other ubiquitous forms of family, from the stepfamily to the single-mother family, in ways that still shape our thinking today. As a work of narrative non-fiction, Kin interweaves the history of the stories we tell about family with my own experiences of growing up in three different stepfamilies. It is forthcoming from Profile in May 2027.


Performance Research Network

Supported by 缅北禁地 Humanities Research Institute and 缅北禁地 Institute for Creative Arts Practice, I run the university's Performance Research Network. This is an interdisciplinary group drawing together thinkers and doers from across 缅北禁地: we research performance; conduct research through performance; and research to create performance. You can read more here: 


Funding/Awards

I was an AHRC BBC New Generation Thinker 2022.

I was nominated for a 缅北禁地 'TEA' Teaching Award in 2021 and 2022.

My online video series 'Stay at Home Shakespeare' won a Renaissance Society of America award for 'Innovative Online Teaching' (2022).

My book Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies is co-winner of the Shakespeare's Globe Book Award 2020.

My project on brother-sister relationships on the early modern stage was funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.

My play The Defamation of Cicely Lee was a 2019 winner of the American Shakespeare Center's 'Shakespeare's New Contemporaries' award, and received an online production during the May 2020 lockdown.

I received an award from the UCL Dean's Fund to direct a staged reading of Paradise Lost, adapted by Dr Eric Langley and co-directed with Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for Shakespeare's Glob in May 2018.

My play Shakespeare's Sister (Samuel French, 2016), which draws on my research on early modern family dynamics, won the Theatre Royal Haymarket Masterclass 'Pitch Your Play' Award 2015.

I was nominated for a King's Teaching Award at King's College London (2015-2016), and I am a Fellow of the HEA.

Teaching

In 2025-6, I will teach on:


Semester 1:

Women on Trial: Gender, Power and Performance in Early Modern Culture (Stage 3, module convenor)

Beginnings (Stage 1)


Semester 2:

Renaissance Bodies (Stage 2; module convenor)



Publications

  • Articles

    • Whipday E. Shakespearean Double Lives. Shakespeare Studies 2023, M. Submitted.
    • Key D, Whipday E. . Research on Medieval and Renaissance Drama 2020, 56/57.
    • Cox Jensen F, Key DL, Whipday E. . Shakespeare 2020, 16(1), 60-67.
    • Lewis S, Whipday E. . Shakespeare 2019, 15(3), 272-282.
    • Cox Jensen O, Robinson J, Whipday E. . Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 2017, 43(2), 160-182.
    • Whipday E, Cox Jensen F. . Shakespeare Bulletin 2017, 35(2), 289-307.
    • Arshad Y, Hackett H, Whipday E. . Early Theatre 2015, 18(2), 167-186.
    • Whipday E. . Cahiers Élisabéthains 2015, 88(1), 95-110.
    • Whipday E. . Shakespeare 2015, 11(3), 272-285.

  • Authored Books

    • Whipday E. . London: Profile, 2027. In Press.
    • Whipday E. . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
    • Whipday E. . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

  • Book Chapters

    • Whipday E. . In: Emma Whipday, ed. Shakespeare / Play: Contemporary Readings in Playing, Playmaking and Performance. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.
    • Whipday E. . In: Peter Kirwan, Duncan Salkeld, ed. Arden of Faversham: A Critical Reader. London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2023.
    • Whipday E, Semple E, Hatfull R. . In: Semple E; Hatfull R, ed. Shakespearean Biofiction on the Contemporary Stage and Screen. London: Bloomsbury, 2023, pp.104–113.
    • Whipday E. . In: Whipday, Emma; Smith, Simon, ed. Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp.37-56.
    • Munro L, Whipday E. . In: Knutson RL; McInnis D; Steggle M, ed. Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time. London: Palgrave, 2020, pp.233-249.
    • Whipday E. . In: Loughnane, R; Semple, E, ed. Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp.215-236.
    • Whipday E. . In: Davies, S;Fletcher, P, ed. News in Early Modern Europe: Currents and Connections. Leiden: Brill, 2014, pp.159-174.

  • Creative Writing

    • Whipday E. . 2016. Samuel French, 82.

  • Edited Books

    • Whipday E, ed. . London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.
    • Whipday E, Smith S, ed. . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

  • Scholarly Edition

    • Whipday E. . In: Emma Smith ed. Oxford World's Classics 2024. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 192.