Staff profiles
Dr Victoria Sparey
Lecturer (E&S)
4317
01392 724317
My research and teaching focus upon sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature, especially the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. I specialize in examining how contemporary ideas about the body informed the performance of age and gender upon the early modern stage. These ideas are reflected in my teaching, which centres upon Shakespeare, performance and the early modern life cycle.
I convene the following modules: "Rethinking Shakespeare" (Level 1); "Life and Death in Early Modern Literature" (Level 3); "Rethinking Shakespeare: Beyond the Bard" (International Summer School).
Research interests
Research and Publications:
I am currently writing a monograph entitled Performing Puberty: Representations of Adolescence in Shakespeare’s Plays.
Article. (Winter, 2020). Co-authored with P .Aebischer. “Black, White and Blue: Pregnancy and Unsettled Binaries in Masque of Blackness (1605)”, Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance. Special Issue: Shakespeare, Blackface, and Performance: A Global Exploration.
Article. "Performing Puberty: Fertile Complexions in Shakespeare’s Love Plots." Shakespeare Bulletin. 33.3 (Fall, 2015): 441-467.
Article. "Identity-Formation and the Breastfeeding Mother in Renaissance Generative Discourses and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus," Social History of Medicine (Summer, 2012): 777-794.
Review. (2020). Shakespeare's Contagious Sympathies: Ill Communications, in Modern Language Review, 115.4: 897-99.
Review. (September, 2014). Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England by Sara Read (Palgrave, 2013), Social History of Medicine.
Review. (March, 2016) Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England by Jennifer Evans (Boydell Press, 2014), Gender and History.
Review, (June, 2010). Wounds, Flesh and Metaphor by Sara Covington. (Palgrave, 2009) Reviews in History.
Blog Entry. ‘A Mother’s Milk’ www.earlymodernmedicine.com (May 2013). Also distributed in the ‘Baby Feeding and Baby Changing’ Tent at Reigate Community Festival as part of their ‘Shakespeare’ theme (Surrey, Summer 2016).
I have been a reader for Shakespeare Bulletin and Social History of Medicine.