Staff Profile

Role in the School

I am Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature, and I co-run the Newcastle University Performance Research Network.

Expertise Summary

I work on early modern drama, focusing on non-normative families, home, genre, theatricality, and domestic and sexual violence (for more information, see the 'Research' tab). 

I would be happy to hear from prospective PhD students interested in working on Shakespeare and/or early modern drama, particularly topics related to family, domesticity, women's voices and agency, witchcraft, desire and consent, early modern playhouse culture, ballads and street literature, and practice as research/creative practice.

Biography

After growing up in the North East, I moved to Nottinghamshire, where I was educated at my local comprehensive: the Minster School in Southwell. I studied English Language and Literature at Oxford as an undergraduate, before studying for an MA in 'English: Shakespeare in History', and a PhD on Shakespeare and domestic tragedy, at UCL. I have taught at Shakespeare's Globe, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, King's College London, UCL, and Brasenose College, Oxford. I was also a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at UCL, working on the brother-sister relationship on the early modern stage; I completed this fellowship at Newcastle before taking up my position as Lecturer.

Research Interests

I am interested in family, gender, and power on the early modern stage, and in early modern culture more broadly. My research focuses on the political significance of household dynamics; the generic expectations that shape texts; and the interplay between performers, playing spaces and audiences on the early modern stage and street. I have published on early modern 'true crime' news pamphlets, staging the home in domestic tragedy, household work in Macbeth and Othello, recent productions of early modern plays, and performance practice as research. My monograph Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies, which explores domestic violence in Shakespeare's plays, domestic tragedies, and early modern popular culture, is published by Cambridge University Press (2019), and is co-winner of the Shakespeare's Globe Book Award 2020. I have edited two essay collections: Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience, and Performance, co-edited with Simon Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Shakespeare/Play (Arden Shakespeare, 2025). My mini-book Teaching Shakespeare and His Sisters: An Embodied Approach (Cambridge UP, 2023) offers a hands-on, practical guide to teaching Shakespeare – and early modern women's writing, creativity, and performance – through our bodies. I wrote the introduction to the new Oxford World's Classics Measure for Measure.

Current Work

My current book project, Kin: An Intimate History of the Family, explores how the idealisation of the nuclear family in Elizabethan England both demonised and marginalised other ubiquitous forms of family, from the stepfamily to the single-mother family, in ways that still shape our thinking today. As a work of narrative non-fiction, Kin interweaves the history of the stories we tell about family with my own experiences of growing up in three different stepfamilies. It is forthcoming from Profile in May 2027.

Performance Research Network

Supported by Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute and Newcastle University Institute for Creative Arts Practice, I run the university's Performance Research Network. This is an interdisciplinary group drawing together thinkers and doers from across Newcastle University: we research performance; conduct research through performance; and research to create performance. You can read more here: https://research.ncl.ac.uk/performance/

Funding/Awards

I was an AHRC BBC New Generation Thinker 2022.

I was nominated for a Newcastle University 'TEA' Teaching Award in 2021 and 2022.

My online video series 'Stay at Home Shakespeare' won a Renaissance Society of America award for 'Innovative Online Teaching' (2022).

My book Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies is co-winner of the Shakespeare's Globe Book Award 2020.

My project on brother-sister relationships on the early modern stage was funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.

My play The Defamation of Cicely Lee was a 2019 winner of the American Shakespeare Center's 'Shakespeare's New Contemporaries' award, and received an online production during the May 2020 lockdown.

I received an award from the UCL Dean's Fund to direct a staged reading of Paradise Lost, adapted by Dr Eric Langley and co-directed with Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for Shakespeare's Glob in May 2018.

My play Shakespeare's Sister (Samuel French, 2016), which draws on my research on early modern family dynamics, won the Theatre Royal Haymarket Masterclass 'Pitch Your Play' Award 2015.

I was nominated for a King's Teaching Award at King's College London (2015-2016), and I am a Fellow of the HEA.

In 2025-6, I will teach on:

Semester 1:

Women on Trial: Gender, Power and Performance in Early Modern Culture (Stage 3, module convenor)

Beginnings (Stage 1)

Semester 2:

Renaissance Bodies (Stage 2; module convenor)

• Articles

  • Whipday E. Shakespearean Double Lives. Shakespeare Studies 2023, M. Submitted.
  • Key D, Whipday E. Tom Tyler and His Wife: Allegory, Satire, Shrews and Sheep. Research on Medieval and Renaissance Drama 2020, 56/57.
  • Cox Jensen F, Key DL, Whipday E. The Disobedient Child: A Tudor Interlude in Performance. Shakespeare 2020, 16(1), 60-67.
  • Lewis S, Whipday E. Sounding Offstage Worlds: Experiencing Liminal Space and Time in Macbeth and Othello. Shakespeare 2019, 15(3), 272-282.
  • Cox Jensen O, Robinson J, Whipday E. Is He a Dramatist? Or, Something Singular! Staging Dickensian Drama as Practice-Led Research. Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 2017, 43(2), 160-182.
  • Whipday E, Cox Jensen F. "Original Practices", lost plays and historical imagination: Staging "The Tragedy of Merry". Shakespeare Bulletin 2017, 35(2), 289-307.
  • Arshad Y, Hackett H, Whipday E. Daniel’s Cleopatra and Lady Anne Clifford: From a Jacobean Portrait to Modern Performance. Early Theatre 2015, 18(2), 167-186.
  • Whipday E. ‘“Marrow Prying Neighbours”: Staging Domestic Space and Neighbourhood Surveillance in Arden of Faversham. Cahiers Élisabéthains 2015, 88(1), 95-110.
  • Whipday E. '"The Picture of a Woman”: Roaring Girls and Alternative Histories in the RSC 2014 Season'. Shakespeare 2015, 11(3), 272-285.

• Authored Books

  • Whipday E. Kin: An Intimate History of the Family. London: Profile, 2027. In Press.
  • Whipday E. Teaching Shakespeare and His Sisters: An Embodied Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
  • Whipday E. Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

• Book Chapters

  • Whipday E. Sex Workers and Silence in Measure for Measure: The Absent Part of Kate Keepdown. In: Emma Whipday, ed. Shakespeare / Play: Contemporary Readings in Playing, Playmaking and Performance. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.
  • Whipday E. Susan of Faversham: Silence, Subordination and Siblinghood in Arden. In: Peter Kirwan, Duncan Salkeld, ed. Arden of Faversham: A Critical Reader. London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2023.
  • Whipday E, Semple E, Hatfull R. Interview on Writing the Play Shakespeare's Sister (2015). In: Semple E; Hatfull R, ed. Shakespearean Biofiction on the Contemporary Stage and Screen. London: Bloomsbury, 2023, pp.104–113.
  • Whipday E. 'Thou Lookst Pale': Narrating Blanching and Blushing on the Early Modern Stage. In: Whipday, Emma; Smith, Simon, ed. Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp.37-56.
  • Munro L, Whipday E. Making Early Modern “Verbatim Theater,” or, “Keep the Widow Waking”. In: Knutson RL; McInnis D; Steggle M, ed. Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time. London: Palgrave, 2020, pp.233-249.
  • Whipday E. Everyday Murder and Household Work in Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies. In: Loughnane, R; Semple, E, ed. Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp.215-236.
  • Whipday E. "A True Reporte": News and the Neighbourhood in Early Modern Domestic Murder Texts. In: Davies, S;Fletcher, P, ed. News in Early Modern Europe: Currents and Connections. Leiden: Brill, 2014, pp.159-174.

• Creative Writing

  • Whipday E. Shakespeare's Sister. 2016. Samuel French, 82.

• Edited Books

  • Whipday E, ed. Shakespeare / Play: Contemporary Readings in Playing, Playmaking and Performance. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.
  • Whipday E, Smith S, ed. Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

• Scholarly Edition

  • Whipday E. Introduction to Measure for Measure. In: Emma Smith ed. Oxford World's Classics 2024. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 192.