About

This is my site: It started off, once upon a time, as a blog focused on early modern books, and that’s why it’s called Wynken de Worde. (He’s pretty cool; someday I’ll get around to writing about him.) Now I write about other stuff as well, and stick that in the “In Other Words” category. If you’re primarily interested in early modern books and culture, you can subscribe to the Wynken de Worde category feed to avoid the yucky Shakespeare and personal stuff.

And this is me: I am the Undergraduate Program Director at the Folger Shakespeare Library, a position I’ve held since 2006; Associate Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly; and Editor of The Collation, a blog about scholarship at the Folger. You can read my cv for details of how I got to this career (or watch my pecha kucha about it).

I write a great deal about Shakespeare and modern performances of Renaissance drama. My first book, Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage, was published by Routledge in 2001. Most recently, the collection I edited on New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies was published by Palgrave; check out my introduction and consider asking your library to buy it so that more people can read it.

I was the guest editor for the Fall 2011 special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly on performance. It went through an open peer review process hosted by MediaCommons, which is one of the reasons that I’m interested in scholarly publications and digital media. Some of the conversations that happened online were incorporated into the print version (“Rethinking Academic Reviewing”); much of the rest of the special issue looks like any other issue of SQ, but it was an exciting process behind the scenes.

As is clear from this site, the more time I spend teaching in a rare materials library, the more interested I’ve become not only in how such libraries might act as classrooms, but how the materiality of special collections might work in conjunction with (or sometimes wrestle against) the new tools of digital humanities scholarship. It’s a lot of what I write about here, and it’s been the focus of a number of talks I’ve given. You can also read Glenn Fleishman’s account of my work in his piece for The Economist‘s Babbage blog.

You can also find me on twitter as @wynkenhimself or reach me through email.

Or, because it’s more fun to learn from students directly, you can read about some George Washington University students and watch the video embedded on that page, or watch the video below of some Georgetown students talk about how much they love the Folger: