Skip to main content

Staff Profile

Dr Laura Wright

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Background

I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellows at Newcastle University, working on a project entitled Sounds of Distress: Hearing Female Complaint(s) in Early Modern Literature. For this book project, I am investigating women’s screams and complaints in early modern poetry and performance. This research engages with sound and the voice and the intersections between gender studies, disability studies, and sensory studies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My first monograph, Sound Effects: Hearing the Early Modern Stage, (forthcoming with Manchester University Press) examined early modern sound effects and their capacity to unsettle the spatial boundaries of the playhouse. My Cambridge Element (Cambridge University Press), Shakespeare’s Visionary Women, forthcoming in 2023, engages with the representation of visionary and hallucinating women on Shakespeare’s stage.

 

I also work in digital theatre and have recently directed several early modern plays for Creation Theatre, including Henry VIII, The Duchess of Malfi (co-directed with Natasha Rickman), and The Witch of Edmonton. 

Research

A blog outlining my research in progress for the British Shakespeare Association can be found at: 

https://www.britishshakespeare.ws/laura-jayne-wright-hearing-female-complaints-in-early-modern-literature/

Other online articles include: 

Shakespeare on Zoom: how a theatre group in isolation conjured up a Tempest’, The Conversation, April 23rd 2020 (https://theconversation.com/shakespeare-on-zoom-how-a-theatre-group-in-isolation-conjured-up-a-tempest-136974).


Digital Theatre and Alientation as Opportunity, Teaching Shakespeare, Dec 2022 (https://www.britishshakespeare.ws/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/TeachingShakespeare23.pdf)


Supernatural Sounds in Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Webster’, English Review (Feb 2020).


Selected talks on my research include: 


‘Touching without Touching: Acting Intimately in Digital Theatre’ (invited talk), University of Geneva, 4.04.22.

‘#BelieveWomen: Joan Puzel, Testimony, and the Limits of the Vision’, Shakespeare’s Globe, 10.12.21.

‘Introduction’, Marlowe Cabaret, The Show Must Go Online, 06.21.

‘Early Modern Aesthetics of Violence: Dramaturgy and Direction’ (invited workshops). University of the Arts, London. For 80 students on the production design of The Duchess of Malfi.

‘Digital Adventures: Performance in Lockdown’ (invited talk). University of Oxford, 04.03.2021.

‘Recreating Soundscapes’, University of York (invited keynote), 5.07.21.

‘Streaming Early Modern Drama: Pedagogy and Praxis’, Premodern Performance Network, 8.07.21.

‘Digital Adventures: Performance in Lockdown’, University of Oxford (invited talk), 04.03.2021.

‘Digital Landscapes: Staging Early Modern Drama without a Stage’, College of Arts and Sciences, Syracuse, New York (invited talk), 01.04.21.

‘Toxic Song: Sonic Memory and the Renegotiation of History’, Forging and Forgetting: The (Re)writing of History, Community and Memory, University of Birmingham, 07.06.21.

‘Painting Sound: Phonography, Aural Complicity, and Shakespeare’s “Silent” Soundscapes’, Renaissance Society of America, 21.04.21.

‘Macbeth’s Offstage Sounds’, Early Modern Global Soundscapes, University of York, 25.01.2019.

‘“the whole house of howlings”: Noisy Devils and Hellish Sounds’, Perdition Catch My Soul: Shakespeare, Hell and Damnation Symposium, Shakespeare’s Globe, 08.12.2018.

‘“Look with thine ears”: The Promise of Sound in King Lear’, Durham University, 03.09.2018.

‘Staging the Night: Sounds and Subterfuge in Fletcher and Shirley’s The Night-Walker’, Listening to Literature, University of Exeter, 28.07.2017.


Teaching

This year I have taught for 'Renaissance Bodies', a module encompassing poetry, drama, and prose, in conversation with complex and changeable early modern ideas of embodiment.

Publications