Join us for an exciting and open-minded roundtable discussion, where we tackle the challenges of Literature’s relationship with History. Followed by refreshments.
We are prompted by the visit to Oxford of Will Tosh, interim director of education and research at the Globe Theatre, author of the recent Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of Shakespeare, and a former Oxford DPhil student. For more information, please visit: www.shakespearesglobe.com/bio/dr-will-tosh.
Who is Shakespeare for us today? Ceola Daly, Laura Seymour, and Caroline Taylor, join Will Tosh and Elizabeth Sandis to discuss their work championing decolonial, neurodiverse, feminist, queer and other approaches to Shakespeare.
Laura Seymour is Principal Investigator of the project “AMEND – Early Modern Neurodivergence” at Swansea University funded by the Wellcome Trust from 2025 to 2030. She is the author of Shakespeare and Neurodiversity (CUP, 2024) and her research illuminates pedagogical and wellbeing practices that can help neurodivergent people to flourish.
Ceola Day is a DPhil student researching the colonial legacies in Shakespearean textual editing, specifically researching the relationship between Shakespeare and national identity within Anglo-Irish contexts of the eighteenth century.
Caroline Taylor is completing a DPhil in seventeenth-century theatre at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Her thesis investigates the interrelation of contagious disease and female sexuality on the English stage during the long seventeenth century (1590-1700).
Elizabeth Sandis completed her DPhil at Oxford and her Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. Since the publication of her monograph, Early Modern Drama at the Universities (OUP, 2022), she has been collaborating with Oxfordshire Drag Collective on a project digging deeper into the history and variety of drag performance culture across the centuries.
We meet under the auspices of the LGBTQ+ History Network, the Centre for Women’s, Gender, Identity and Queer history, and St John’s College.
Email mailto:elizabeth.sandis@ashmus.ox.ac.uk if you would like to join the speakers for dinner at 18:45.
