Directors and Associates

Project Directors

Lynsey McCulloch is a Research Fellow with the Royal Shakespeare Company. She is an early modern specialist and her research focuses on the relationship between Shakespeare and dance. Previously she taught literary studies and creative writing at Coventry University and worked with undergraduate students at the University of Warwick. Dr. McCulloch co-edited Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance (2013) with Sarah A. Brown and Robert Lublin and co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (2019) with Brandon Shaw. She is currently writing about early modern dance and literature for the 6-volume Cultural History of Dance (Bloomsbury). Dr. McCulloch edits the interdisciplinary, open access Journal of the Northern Renaissance and has served as a member of the Executive Committee for the Society for Dance Research.

Linda McJannet, Emeritus Professor of English and Media Studies at Bentley University in Waltham, MA, graduated from Wellesley College and received her doctorate from Harvard University. She has published essays in journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Theatre Research International, The Journal of Theatre and Drama, The Huntington Library Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Dance Chronicle, and Borrowers and Lenders. Chapters on dance theatre and physical theatre versions of Shakespeare appear in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (2019) and in Shakespeare On Stage and Off (2019). She is also the author of two monographs, The Voice of Elizabethan Stage Directions: The Evolution of a Theatrical Code (1999) and The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks (2006). Her most recent essay, “Line Dancing, Belly Dancing, and Martial Arts: Staging the Soldiers’ Dance in Pericles,” appeared in 2024 in a special section of The Shakespearean International Yearbook. She is a lifelong dancer as well as a student of Shakespeare in performance.

Amy Rodgers is Associate Professor of Film, Media, Theater at Mount Holyoke College. She received her Ph.D. in English Language and Literature and a Graduate Certificate in Screen Arts and Cultures from the University of Michigan. Her publications include the monograph A Monster with a Thousand Hands: The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England (2018), and essays in The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time, edited by Greg Colòn Semenza (2009); The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Vol. 6, edited by Christine Bold ( 2012); Shakespearean Echoes, edited by Adam Hansen and Kevin Wetmore (2015); and Renaissance Drama. A former member of the Washington, Joffrey, and Atlanta ballet companies, Dr. Rodgers attributes her longstanding interest in performance and reception theory to her dance career.

Emily Winerock teaches Dance History at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, PA. Her research focuses on the practices and politics of dance in 16th- and 17th-century Europe. She received her B.A. from Princeton University, M.A. from the University of Sussex, and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Her publications include essays in Shakespeare Jahrbuch (2021), Borrowers and Lenders (2017), and Dance Chronicle (2016), as well as chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (2019), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition (2018), Playthings in Early Modernity (2017), The Sacralization of Space and Behavior in the Early Modern World (2015), and Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2011). She is the co-chair of the Early Dance Working Group of the Dance Studies Association, and the founder and moderator of the Dance Historians Network on LinkedIn.

Project Associates

Emma Atwood is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Montevallo, Alabama’s only public liberal arts college. She teaches courses on Shakespeare, Early Modern Drama, Early Modern Poetry, and Renaissance Women and Gender. Her research interests include spatial dramaturgy, performance theory, and women, gender, and sexuality. She has published on Shakespeare and dance in Borrowers and Lenders, and her current book manuscript examines the staging of domestic space in Early Modern drama. She earned her Ph.D. from Boston College and her B.A. from Kalamazoo College.

Iris Julia Bührle has been researching the choreographic adaptation of works of literature since 2004. Following a postdoctoral research fellowship at New College, Oxford, she published a history of ballets based on William Shakespeare’s works from the birth of the dramatic story ballet to the present, entitled Dancing Shakespeare (Routledge, 2024). Her other publications include the monograph Literature and Dance: the Choreographic Adaptation of Works of Literature from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day (in German, Königshausen & Neumann, 2014), and a biography of the dancer Robert Tewsley (Robert Tewsley: Dancing Beyond Borders, bilingual English-German, Königshausen & Neumann, 2011).

Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau is associate professor of American Literature and Dance Studies in Sorbonne Université and a junior member of the IUF (Institut Universitaire de France). She is the author of Emily Dickinson du côté de Shakespeare, modalités théâtrales du lyrisme (PUBP, 2020), and has directed the special issue of peer-reviewed journal Cahiers Elizabéthains on Shakespeare and Dance (2020). Her research focuses on the dialogue between literature and dance; in addition to the publication of several peer-reviewed articles, she has choreographed “Instincts for Dance, A Choreographic Translation of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry”, which premiered in Seville in July 2022.

Fabio Ciambella is a Researcher of English Language at Sapienza University of Rome, specializing in the relationships between dance and early modern and Victorian literature and language. In 2013 he published a book about dance in nineteenth-century England, in 2016 his PhD thesis received an award from the Italian Association of English Studies (AIA), and in 2017 he published a study of dance and the Copernican Revolution in Shakespeare’s canon. He has also written about dance in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (2017, 2020) and the influence of Italian dance treatises on early modern English terpsichorean manuals (2020). Most recently he has published Dance Lexicon in Shakespeare and His Contemporary: A Corpus-based Approach with Routledge (2021).

Anne Daye is the Director of Education and Research for the Historical Dance Society and has lectured in dance history since 1991, most recently at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. Dr. Daye has articles in Historical Dance and Dance Research, and she has contributed essays to several edited collections, including The Oxford Handbook for Shakespeare and Dance. Her doctoral thesis, “The Jacobean Antimasque within the Masque Context: A Dance Perspective” (Roehampton University, 2008) presented new thinking on the dance and theatre practice of the masque. Dr. Daye is also a freelance researcher, teacher, and reconstructor of dances from original sources.

Sidia Fiorato is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Verona, Italy. Her fields of research include the relationships among dance, literature, and culture, which she approaches from interdisciplinary and performance perspectives. She has written on ballet adaptations of Shakespeare, including Romeo and Juliet (MacMillan), The Dream (Ashton), The Tempest (Mannes). With John Drakakis, she edited Performing the Renaissance Body. Essays on Drama, Law and Representations (Boston and Berlin: Degruyter, 2017), a collection analyzing articulations of the concept of performance in the Renaissance. She is co-founder of the Verona Shakespeare Fringe Festival, established in 2021, and part of its scientific and organization board.

Ilana Gilovich-Wave earned her Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance at Columbia University. She has performed with Punchdrunk’s off-Broadway Macbeth adaptation Sleep No More since 2012. She earned her B.A. in English at Cornell University, and her M.A. in Literary Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. She has volunteered with the Cornell Prison Education Program to teach Shakespeare Studies at Auburn Maximum Security Prison and has worked on Shakespeare education programs for youth with Epic Theatre Ensemble and the Belfast Ulster Museum.

James Hewison is Senior Lecturer in Dance at Edge Hill University in Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK. He has choreographed, performed, and toured internationally in professional contemporary dance and physical theatre work since 1991. He was a co-founder and Associate Artistic Director of Vtol Dance (1991-2000) and has also performed extensively with, and written about, Volcano Theatre Company, including in “Shakespeare and L.O.V.E: dance and desire in the Sonnets” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (2019, eds. McCulloch and Shaw). Most recently, he published on, and created a choreographic performance in response to, the work of the surrealist artist, Leonora Carrington: Leonora Carrington: Living Legacies, (2020, eds. Cox, Hewison, Man, Shannon), and Imaginarium (Hewison and Man).

Andrew Hiscock is Professor of Early Modern Literature at Bangor University, Wales, and Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche pour la Renaissance, l’Âge Classique et les Lumières at université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier III. His interests in dance are linked directly to the early modern period and to Shakespearean dance adaptation in recent centuries. He has published widely on English and French Renaissance literature. He is a Fellow of the English Association, English literature editor of MLR and series co-editor for the Arden Early Modern Drama Guides. His most recent dance-focused publication is: “Moving Shakespeare: La danse narrative and adapting to the Bard” in Cahiers Élisabéthains 102, no. 1 (2020): 18-37.

Melissa Hudler holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature from Anglia Ruskin University. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, where she teaches courses in composition and rhetoric, pre-1800 British literature, ethics and literature, and health humanities. Her research interests include corporeal rhetoric (stasis, gesture, dance) in Renaissance literature, medical/health humanities, and illness and trauma narratives.

Nancy Isenberg, Professor of English Literature at the University of Rome Three (retired), has worked extensively on Shakespeare, focusing mainly but not exclusively on his dramatic works in relation to dance. Most recently, she wrote the chapter on ballet in the Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare (2016), and she has contributed studies on Shakespeare ballets and dance in Shakespeare to numerous collective thematic volumes. She co-edited Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Unipress, 2010) and La posa eroica di Ofelia. Saggi sul personaggio femminile nel teatro elisabettiano (Roma: Storia e letteratura, 2003). Her work on literary ballets outside the Shakespeare canon includes ballet appropriations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. In 2017, she was a resident fellow at the NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts (http://balletcenter.nyu.edu/fellows/nancy-isenberg/).

Jonas Kellermann is a lecturer of English literature at the University of Konstanz. He holds a B.A. in English Philology and Theatre Studies and an M.A. in English Studies from Freie Universität Berlin, and he received his Ph.D. from the University of Konstanz in 2020. During his undergraduate studies, he spent a year as an Erasmus exchange student at the University of Edinburgh. He was awarded the Martin Lehnert Prize by the German Shakespeare Association and the City of Konstanz Prize to Promote Early Career Researchers at the University of Konstanz. He is the author of Dramaturgies of Love in Romeo and Juliet: Word, Music, and Dance (Routledge, 2021). Aside from the early modern period, his research focuses on the English-language novel of the 20th and 21st century and queer studies.

G. Yvonne Kendall is a Stanford University-trained musicologist with a specialty in historical dance. She studied with Julia Sutton at the New England Conservatory of Music. Her publications include The Music of Arbeau’s Orchésographie (Pendragon, 2013); essays in collections and in journals including Early Music, Dance Research, and Renaissance Quarterly; entries in Grove Music Online (“Arbeau,”and forthcoming “Cesare Negri” and “Fabritsio Caroso”); and “Dance” in the Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (Scribners & Sons, 1999). Dr. Kendall has held two summer fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is currently translating a newly discovered dance manuscript from seventeenth-century Catalonia.

Elizabeth Klett is Professor of Literature at the University of Houston – Clear Lake and a scholar of Shakespeare and adaptation in theatre, film, television, and dance. She is the author of Choreographing Shakespeare: Dance Adaptations of the Plays and Poems (Routledge, 2019), Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity (Palgrave, 2009) and chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (Oxford UP, 2019), Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an Era of Textual Exhaustion (Routledge, 2018), Shakespeare Re-dressed, ed. James C. Bulman (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2008), and Retrovisions, ed. Deborah Cartmell (Pluto, 2001). She has also published essays in Shakespeare, Borrowers and Lenders, Textshop Experiments, Theatre Journal, Shakespeare Bulletin, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Early Modern Studies Journal.

Vanessa Lim is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature at Seoul National University. Her main areas of research include classical and Renaissance rhetoric, Shakespeare, and early modern literature more generally. Her interest in Shakespeare and dance stems from ongoing forays into the field of adaptation studies, a longstanding interest in classical ballet, and her own dance background. She is currently on the Advisory Board of Shakespeare Survey and serves as an Arden Fourth Series Fellow.

Erika T. Lin is an Associate Professor in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance, which received the 2013 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies. With Gina Bloom and Tom Bishop, she edited the essay collection Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England (2021). Her articles have appeared in Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, and elsewhere, and have won numerous prizes, including an Honorable Mention for the 2016 Award for Best Article on Women and Gender from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women for “A Witch in the Morris: Hobbyhorse Tricks and Early Modern Erotic Transformations” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater. Dr. Lin is now writing a book on seasonal festivities and early modern commercial theatre, a project recognized by various honors and grants including an Andrew W. Mellon Long-Term Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has served as the Book Review Editor of Theatre Survey and as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Shakespeare Association of America, for whom she continues as the Board representative to the Bylaws Committee.

Maria Marcsek-Fuchs is lecturer and member of the research staff of British Literary and Cultural Studies at the Technische Universität Braunschweig. Her research areas include intermediality and adaptation studies as well as Shakespeare (dance) adaptions. Recent publications include “Dance and British Literature: an Intermedial Encounter,” “Romeo and Juliet Re-danced: Choreographic Remakings of Shakespeare’s Tragedy,” an article on Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale in Shakespeare Jahrbuch 15 (2021), and the forthcoming “Missing Words, Polydirectional Adaptation, and Metareference as Choreographic Strategy in Shakespearean Dance Adaptations” (Shakespeare Seminar Online; German Shakespeare Society). Aside from her doctorate in English literature, she holds a degree in choreography from the Palucca University of Dance (Dresden) and trained as a professional dancer at the Joffrey Ballet School and School of American Ballet (New York). She has been staging student productions of Shakespeare combining text and dance at universities since 1995.

Nona Monahin is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Music at Mount Holyoke College where she teaches Renaissance and Baroque dance. A scholar-practitioner, she has presented lectures and workshops on music and dance in Australia, Europe, and North America, including at conferences of the Dance Studies Association; the American, Australian, and International Musicological societies; and the American and International Shakespeare associations. She has directed dance ensembles and created choreographies for many Shakespeare plays and other theater productions and has a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (2019) on interpreting Shakespeare’s dance references. In addition to historical dance, her dance background includes ballet, modern, Duncan, English country, and folk dance. Her current research explores relationships between music and dance in 20th- and 21st-century choreography, focusing on ballets set to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet score. She also enjoys choreographing dances in a free (non-historical) style. Nona is fluent in Russian and German.

Jennifer Nevile (PhD 1992) has published extensively on western European dance practices from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, especially dance in Italy, England, and France, and the relationship of dance with other contemporary artistic practices and intellectual movements. She has investigated dance as a physical expression of Renaissance humanism, the relationship between fifteenth-century Italian dance and music, performance practice issues, aspects of danced spectacles, the connection between dance and identity, choreographic meaning and structures, audience-performer relationships, and the design principles of early modern choreographies and European grand gardens. Her work on English dance includes the Introduction to Part I of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance, ed. Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw (2019), and “’These bookes, as I heare, are all cawled in’: Dance and Choreographic Records from the Stuart Masques” in Early Theatre (2009). Over the past few years she has edited A Cultural History of Western Dance in the Age of Absolutism and Enlightenment, the fourth volume in the 6 volume series A Cultural History of Western Dance (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2026) as well as written three chapters across volumes 3 and 4.

Erin O’Keefe is an incoming English Ph.D. student at Stanford University. She holds a B.A. in English and a B.A. in Dance from the University of Georgia. Erin is a classically trained ballet dancer and contemporary dance choreographer. She has performed with dance companies including the Martha Graham Dance Company, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, and Kit Modus. Erin recently presented her paper “Shakespeare’s Dancing Plays and Eternality: The Idealization of the Moving Body Onstage” at the 2024 Early Dance Symposium, New Work on Old Dance: A Pre-1800 Dance Studies Symposium. Erin’s current research focuses on how the rise of ballet d’action and visual aesthetics influenced British literature from the early modern period through the eighteenth-century.

Elinor Parsons is Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University, Leicester. Her research examines productions of Renaissance plays with a focus on danced, musical, and operatic adaptations. She has written articles analyzing the Shakespearean ballets of Bintley, Helpmann, MacMillan, and Vasiliev, and she focused on narrative choices in her chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (2019). Dr. Parsons has produced book and performance reviews for several journals and currently writes the “Shakespeare on screen” entry for the Year’s Work in English Studies.

Brandon Calleja Shaw is an educator and performing artist. His interest is in body culture in early modern England, especially relations between dance and martial arts. Dr. Calleja Shaw is co-editor of the The Oxford Handbook for Shakespeare and Dance (2019), and his articles and reviews have appeared in Theatre Journal, TDR/The Drama Review, and The Bryn Mawr Classical Review, with articles forthcoming in Dance Research Journal and About Performance. He held positions as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies at Brown University, Lecture and Postgraduate Studies Director in Dance Studies at the University of Malta, and a Scholar-in-Residence at Jacob’s Pillow.
website: www.brandonxshaw.com

Jade Standing is the George Whalley Visiting Professor in Early Modern Literature at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. She is the author of The Play of Conscience in Shakespeare’s England (Routledge, 2023). Her recent research focuses on the role of conscience in group and partnered training exercises, particularly between fencers but also dancers and other movement artists. She studies and practices historical fencing.

Seth Stewart Williams is an assistant professor in the Department of Dance and the Medieval and Renaissance Studies program at Barnard College of Columbia University, and affiliate faculty of Columbia’s Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Performance. He studies the interrelation of dance and literature, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and his work as a historian of performance spans early and late modernity. He has received fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Center for the Study of Ballet and the Arts, and has served as a scholar-in-residence at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. His performance career included work with Sean Curran, Donald McKayle, and Mark Morris, and with the New York Baroque Dance Company.

Leigh Witchel is the editor of dancelog.nyc. Collaborating with Dr. Amy Rodgers, his current long-term project is a series of essays juxtaposing dance criticism with literary theory. He also participated in 2023 in the Dancing Shakespeare conference at the Sorbonne. Based in New York City, his involvement in dance over three-and-a-half decades led him from dancing to choreography to writing. Previously, he was the dance writer for The New York Post and Associate Editor for DanceviewTimes.com. He writes regularly for many dance publications including Dance Europe and Pointe Magazine at present, and previously for Ballet Review, Dancing Times, Dance Now, and Dance View. He has seen and written about most major ballet company in the United States and Europe. Mr. Witchel’s publications include “40 Years of Agon” in Reading Dance, edited by Robert Gottlieb (Pantheon, 2008), and “Robert Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze” in Balanchine: Celebrating a Life in Dance, by Costas (Tide-Mark, 2003), and he assisted in writing The Ballet Companion: A Dancer’s Guide to the Technique, Traditions, and Joys of Ballet, by Eliza Gaynor-Minden (Fireside, 2005). Mr. Witchel was also the founder of the Manhattan-based chamber ballet company Dance as Ever and the creator of more than fifty ballets, including commissions for the Louisville Ballet, Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, Ballet Pacifica, and Virginia Ballet Theatre. He was a 2001 Guggenheim fellow in choreography.

Research Assistants

Megan L. Clement, University of Pittsburgh, 2016

Maxim Fortuny, Bentley University, 2014-2015

Kirsten Holzer, Bentley University, 2014-2015

Danielle Petrunich, Bentley University, 2015-2016

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the support of Bentley University, Mount Holyoke College, the International Shakespeare Association, Renaissance Association of America, World Shakespeare Congress, and the Shakespeare Association of America for supporting our conference presentations.

Updated March 11, 2025.