Dr Chloe Preedy (She/her)

My research focuses mainly on early modern drama, although I am also interested in the prose and poetry of this period, the modern afterlives of Renaissance people, publications, and playhouses, and spatial questions in relation to modern drama. My first book, Marlowe's Literary Scepticism: Politic Religion and Post-Reformation Polemic (Arden, 2013), was awarded the Roma Gill Prize for the best new work in Marlowe studies. I co-edited Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta with Professor William Sherman for Arden Early Modern Drama (2021). I have published articles on the drama of Shakespeare, Heywood, Jonson, Kyd, and Peele, among others, as well as Nashe's prose writings. Between 2018 and 2021, I led an AHRC-funded project, Atmospheric Theatre: Open-Air Performance and the Environment, with my colleague Dr Evelyn O'Malley (Drama) and in partnership with the Dukes' Theatre, the Minack, and the Willow Globe; this project investigated how attending an open-air dramatic performance might influence playgoers’ awareness of their aerial environment and involved audience and practitioner interviews, network meetings, focus groups, performance workshops, and the development of a project website with linked educational resources. As part of this project, I co-edited a special issue of Performance Research, 'On Air', with Evelyn O'Malley, which was published in 2021. My related individual monograph, Aerial Environments on the Early Modern Stage: Theatres of the Air, 1576-1609, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. I regularly teach undergraduate modules on Shakespeare, early modern literature, and dramatic texts, and act as a PhD supervisor. My latest research project considers how early modern theatre was influenced by and responded to extreme weather, and I am currently finalising a new book on Playing Weather in Early Modern England: Theatre’s Meteorological Environments. I am also an active scholarly editor, preparing Original Spelling and Modern Spelling editions of The First Part of the Contention for The Oxford Marlowe: Collected Works. 

Biography:

I completed my PhD at the University of York in 2011. Before joining the University of Exeter in 2013, I was a Teaching Associate in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the University of Cambridge. During my time at Cambridge I was also a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College. I have worked at Exeter since September 2013, teaching at both the Penryn and Streatham campuses.

Research supervision:

I an interested in hearing about research proposals that relate to any area of early modern literature, especially projects on the drama of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, or their contemporaries. I am very happy to consider working with MRes or PhD applicants with interests in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century drama; theatrical performance; early modern reception histories; early modern environmentalism; revenge literature; or early modern religious conflict.