Academic Background

I was educated at the High School of Dundee and Central Newcastle High School for Girls. I received my BA from London University (Westfield College), my MA from the Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham) and my Ph.D from London University (King's College). In 1987 I received a Leverhulme post-doctoral award which I held at the University of Toronto; more recently I received a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in Oxford. From 1988 to 1999 I taught at the University of Ottawa.

Undergraduate Teaching

To undergraduates at Magdalen I teach: Shakespeare; 1509-1642; 1642-1740; and individual authors and topics from 1509 onwards. To English and Classics students I teach Shakespeare; 1509-1600; 1600-1662; Tragedy; Satire; Pastoral. I lecture on Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the English Faculty and teach graduate courses to Masters of Studies students.

Research Interests

My research encompasses textual studies, editing, Elizabethan performance, classical influences on Renaissance writers, Elizabethan barbers and surgeons, contemporary performances of Shakespeare’s plays, and feminist criticism.

Selected Publications

Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)

Shakespeare’s Names (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

How to Do Things with Shakespeare (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)

Where There’s a Will There’s a Way ((New York: Penguin, 2006; London: Nicholas Brealey, 2007)

Studying Shakespeare: A Guide to the Plays (Oxford: Blackwell, September 2003; reprinted January 2004, March 2004)

Shakespearean Suspect Texts: the "Bad Quartos" and their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

"How Many Children had Alice Walker?” In Printing and Parenting in Early Modern Drama ed. Douglas Brooks (London: Ashgate, 2005): 327-350.

“‘Actions that a man might play’: Mourning, Memory and Performance in Hamlet”. Performance Research (2002): 66-76.

“The Anatomy of Abuse(s): Performing Anger in Troilus and Cressida”. Renaissance Drama (2002): 153-84.

“Composition/Decomposition: Singular Shakespeare and Plural Texts”. In Renaissance Text ed. Andrew Murphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000): 135-153.

"Cultural Control in The Taming of the Shrew”. Renaissance Drama 26 (1995): 83-104.