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Director of the Shakespeare Programme, Lancaster University

Alison Findlay is Professor of Renaissance Drama and Director of the Shakespeare Programme in the Department of English and Creative Writing. She specialises in sixteenth and seventeenth century drama and early modern women's writing.

She is the author of Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) and A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (Oxford, Blackwell, 1999), a book which uses women's writing to analyse mainstream drama by men. She has published numerous essays and articles on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and reviewed books on Shakespeare's life, times and stage for Shakespeare Survey.

Most recently she has completed Women in Shakespeare for the Shakespeare Dictionary Series published by Arden (Bloomsbury Press) and Much Ado About Nothing: a guide to the text and play in performance (2011) Her most recent essays on Shakespeare have been on Much Ado About Nothing (2010, and 2012) and Comedy of Errors (2012). In the past, she has co-edited volumes of essays with Richard Dutton and Richard Wilson, and written for the Shakespeare section of the electronic journal Compass (Blackwell Publishers), Shakespeare Survey, and the Blackwell's Companions to Shakespeare's Comedies, Renaissance Drama and Renaissance Literature.

Alison has particular interest in feminist approaches to literature and drama in performance, including practical work on dramatic texts. She is co-author of Women and Dramatic Production 1550-1700 (Longman's Medieval and Renaissance Library; Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), and Playing Spaces in Early Women's Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Experience

  • –present
    Director of the Shakespeare Programme, Lancaster University