Penelope Woods

Dr Pen Woods is currently a Research Assistant on the Empire / Migration / Belonging project. Woods is a cultural theorist of affect and a historian of the emotions with a focus on how emotions underpin the social and cultural scripts that shape institutions, systems and lives. She is researching the public discourse of empire in the UK and its influence on teaching in secondary schools, examining publishing histories of critical scholarship and the UK culture and arts sector engagement with disseminating histories of empire.

Woods collaborated with Shakespeare's Globe and Queen Mary University of London on a PhD project on Globe Audiences from 2007-2012 and was appointed to a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Australian Centre for Excellence for the History of the Emotions at the University of Western Australia 2012-2015. She was awarded a SLAM Fellowship to spend a year at Sydney University. Between 2014-2016 she received funding from CHE and Shakespeare's Globe to accompany the Globe to Globe Hamlet World Tour and collaborated with Dr. Malcolm Cocks on the compilation of the largest global audience data set for one production. From 2015-2021 she was a Lecturer in Drama at Queen Mary University of London, spending six months at The Graduate Centre, in the City University of New York. In 2022 she was appointed to a temporary position as Lecturer of Early Modern Studies at Newcastle University, and in 2023 was appointed to a temporary position as Lecture of Drama and Translation Studies at the University of Essex.