Dr Hanh Bui is the Teaching and Research Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe. Her scholarship is positioned at the crossroads of race, age, disability, and early modern theatre. Her work has appeared in Shakespeare Survey, Renaissance Studies, Renaissance Drama, Literature/Film Quarterly, and the edited collection Shakespeare’s Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance (Routledge 2021). Her current book project is entitled Birthing Race on Shakespeare’s Stage.

Hanh is also on the steering committee of the Early Modern Scholars of Colour (EMSOC) network. She completed her PhD in English at Brandeis University and her BA at Stanford University.

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 questions: how did innovations in early modern science affect cultural attitudes toward old age, and how did writers such as Shakespeare respond to these developments? 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

Articles:

‘”Send the midwife”: The Birth of Blackness in Titus Andronicus‘, Renaissance Studies (2024).

‘Sycorax’s Hoop’, Shakespeare Survey (2023).

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

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

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).

Reviews:  

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).

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