Academic Staff

Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, Head Of Courses And Research

Farah Karim-Cooper is Head of Courses and Research at Shakespeare’s Globe and Visiting Research Fellow, King’s College London. She co-directs the MA in Shakespeare’s Studies offered jointly by King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe and is Chair of the Globe Architecture Research Group.

Her publications are listed as follows: Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama, Edinburgh University Press (2006); Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, co-editor Christie Carson, Cambridge University Press, 2008; Shakespeare and the Hand (forthcoming).

In addition to a number of articles and reviews, she has published essays, including, ‘Literary Heritage: Stratford and the Globe’, in conversation, Farah Karim-Cooper and Kate Rumbold, Authors at Work: The Creative Environment, ed. Ceri Sullivan and Graeme Harper (The English Association, 2009); ‘Performing Beauty on the Renaissance Stage’, Shakespeare in Stages: New Directions in Theatre History, ed. Christie Carson and Christine Dymkowski (Cambridge University Press, 2009); ‘Props and the Construction of History at Shakespeare’s Globe’, in Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre, ed. Bridget Escolme and Stuart Hampton-Reeves (Palgrave, 2010); ‘Playing, Disguise, and Identity’, in Middleton in Context, ed. Suzanne Gossett (Cambridge University Press, 2010); ‘“Non-Shakespeare” at Shakespeare’s Globe’, in Performing Early Modern Drama Today, ed. Kathryn Prince and Pascale Aebischer (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

CDA PhD Students

Sarah Dustagheer

Sarah has a BA in English Language and Literature from St Anne’s College, Oxford University.  In 2005 she completed an MA in Shakespearean Studies: Text and Playhouse at King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe.  She wrote her dissertation on anti-theatricality and metatheatricality in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Sarah has recently completed a Collaborative Doctoral Award at King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe; her thesis is entitled ‘Repertory and the Production of Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599-1613’. 

Articles include: ‘Focus on Shakespeare? Is there no play to ease the anguish of a torturing hour?: teaching through performance’ (Arts Professional 99, June 2005), ‘“Such shapes, such gesture and such sound”: The Tempest at the Blackfriars’ (Around the Globe, Autumn 2008), ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’ and ‘Richard III’ in The Shakespeare Encyclopaedia: The Complete Guide to the Man and His Works (London: Apple Press, 2009) and ‘Our Scene is London’: The Alchemist and urban underworlds at the Blackfriars playhouse’ forthcoming in Shakespeare Jarbuch.

Penelope Woods

Penelope has recently completed a Collaborative Doctoral Award. This was a CDA project supervised by Dr Bridget Escolme, Queen Mary, University of London and Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, Head of Courses and Research at Shakespeare's Globe. Penelope read English at St John's College, Oxford and has a Masters in ‘Cultural and Intellectual History 1300-1650’ from the Warburg Institute, University of London.

Her CDA was an audience studies project that examined the conditions of production and reception at the reconstructed Globe theatre, 1997-2010, and comparatively at the first Globe theatre, 1599-1613. It considered how meaning is made by/for audiences, and how spectatorship ‘works’ in this space.

The thesis addressed the conditions of production and reception through four comparative fo-cuses on: the particular historicity of the current and early modern theatre; the work/labour done on stage and off stage; the function of illusion or make-believe on each of these stages; and finally the production of a sense of community in this theatre space today and in the early seven-teenth century.

Research Assistants

Amy Kenny - PhD Student, University of Sussex

Amy's research examines how the size, shape and function of the nuclear family presented in Shakespeare's plays correlates to his own society's conceptions of domestic relationships. She is focusing on three main components of the expected family structure: marriage, childhood and adolescence. Due to the fact that the household functioned as both a model for the hierarchy of the government and a way to regulate disruptive behaviour in the community throughout the early modern period, many contemporary manuals, treatise and diaries establish what was considered normative domestic behaviour at the time. By evaluating Shakespeare's plays through these contemporary attitudes, specifically their treatment of privacy, household structure and medical beliefs surrounding reproduction and gynaecology, Amy's research aims to gain a better understanding of the characterisation and purpose of the families in his plays."

King's MA (Shakespeare Studies) Research Interns

Charlotte Loftus
Taarini Mookherjee
Sadie Moore
Erin Wagner