BIOGRAPHY

Dr Hanh Bui

Dr Hanh Bui is the Teaching and Research Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. She helps to organise and host ‘Anti-Racist Shakespeare’, a series of free webinars which brings together scholars and theatre practitioners to discuss Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of race and social justice. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey, Renaissance Drama, Literature/Film Quarterly, and the collection Shakespeare’s Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance (Routledge, 2021). 

Hanh completed her Ph.D. in English at Brandeis University (USA). Her research interests include ageing studies, early modern health and medicine, premodern critical race studies, and disability studies. Her research appears in Renaissance Drama, Literature/Film Quarterly, and the edited volume Shakespeare’s Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance (Routledge 2020). Hanh’s current book project is entitled Seeing the Un-Scene: The Neglected Histories of Shakespeare’s Offstage Women.

Research Interests
Hanh’s doctoral thesis addresses the role that medical and scientific technology plays in the performance, construction, and constitution of ageing bodies in Shakespeare’s works. It considers the question: how did innovations in early modern science affect cultural attitudes toward old age? The project combines multiple approaches and archives to widen the historiography of early modern ageing to focus on material culture – inventions such as the mirror, spectacles, and clock – along with changing medical practices in anatomy and life extension, to explore how science introduced new contingencies to the life course.

Publications

Chapters:
‘The Mirror and Age in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky (eds), Shakespeare’s Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance (Routledge, 2020).

Articles and Reviews:
‘King Lear and the Duty to Die’, Renaissance Drama (2021).

‘Effigies of Childhood in Kurzel’s Macbeth’, Literature/Film Quarterly (January 2020).

Review: Tomas Macsotay, Cornelis van der Haven, and Karel Vanhaesebrouck (eds), The Hurt(ful) Body: Performing and Beholding Pain, 1600-1800, in British Journal for the History of Science (December 2019).

Review: Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, in Shakespeare Newsletter (Spring 2017).