Dr Esme Miskimmin

Research Overview

My main area of teaching and research / scholarship is Renaissance drama / Shakespeare, and my work on Shakespeare and Early Modern theatre has a pedagogical basis: I worked for four years on the editorial team of the RSC Complete Works (2008) and the individual volumes of the plays (2008-2012), producing chapters aimed at students for the latter, and I recently contributed a chapter on 'Richard II Learning and Teaching Resources: Text, Context and Performance' to Arden Critical Reader. In addition to university-based teaching, I have worked in conjunction with the Everyman&Playhouse theatres in Liverpool, contributing to their outreach and wider participation events, and have been involved in designing a scheme of work aimed at contextualising Shakespeare in the lives of year 7 pupils for the Shakespeare North 'Our Place' project.

I also have interests in genre-based literature studies, specifically in crime fiction and children's literature and I occasionally manage to combine these with each other, and / or with drama, considering the ways in which detective fiction makes use of models and narratives of Renaissance drama, for example, or their shared concerns with the metatheatrical/metatextual. My current focus, in collaboration with my colleague Dr Katie Knowles, looks at the ways in which children's literature represents the theatre and the child performer.