Dr Hanh Bui is the Teaching and Research Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe. 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 in Renaissance Studies, 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 and her B.A. at Stanford University. Her research interests include premodern critical race studies, ageing studies, early modern health and medicine, and disability studies. Hanh’s current book project is entitled Rites of Passage: Shakespeare on Race, Gender, and the Life Course.

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).