Dr. Miranda Fay Thomas

I joined Trinity in 2019, having previously taught at UCD, Central School of Speech and Drama, the University of Greenwich, King's College London, Shakespeare's Globe, and Oxford University. In 2017 I was a post-doctoral fellow at Shakespeare's Globe on the Read Not Dead rehearsed readings project. At Trinity I teach on a range of modules, from first-year survey courses to sophister special topics, and offer doctoral supervision. You can find me on Twitter @DrMirandaFay I am the Director of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning for the School of Creative Arts, Visiting Student Co-ordinator for the Department of Drama, and the School Champion for the Trinity Inclusive Curriculum Project. I am also the co-director of the MPhil in Theatre and Performance, and have previously co-chaired the Trinity Staff LGBTQ Network. My responsibilities outside Trinity include being a Trustee of the British Shakespeare Association and being a peer reviewer for a number of leading journals and publishers. From time to time I write reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and contribute to podcasts such as Not Just The Tudors and That Shakespeare Life. I have also contributed programme notes for productions at Shakespeare''s Globe, and written numerous pieces for the Globe magazine. I am also on the Advisory Board for Hedgepig Theatre''s 'Expand The Canon' project. My research is on early modern drama, specialising in theatre history and dramatic afterlives, with particular interests in gender, embodiment, and accessibility. Work of mine has been published in Early Modern Literary Studies, The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare's Queens, How and Why We Teach Shakespeare, Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations, and The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration. My first monograph, published in 2020 with Arden Bloomsbury, is entitled Shakespeare's Body Language: Shaming Gestures and Gender Politics on the Renaissance Stage. This book explores gestures such as spitting, thumb-biting, hand-washing, and stillness as a way of interrogating gender norms in the age of Shakespeare, and considers non-verbal communication both as reactionary outbursts of conservatism as well as acts of resistance. I edited The Tempest for Arden Performance Editions (2021), and am a Contributing Editor to the New Oxford Shakespeare (my critical edition of the quarto text of The Merry Wives of Windsor will appear in the New Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Alternative Versions, 2025). From 2022 -- 2024 I am writing the annual review of books on Shakespeare in performance for Shakespeare Survey. Current research includes projects on the politics of casting practices in Shakespearean productions; a history of Shakespeare's Globe under the artistic directorships of Emma Rice and Michelle Terry; and a co-edited collection (The Idea of the Shakespearean Actor, with Sally Barnden and Emer McHugh).

  ACCESSIBILITY   Adaptations and afterlives   Early Modern Drama   Embodiment   Gender   PERFORMANCE   Shakespeare   Theatre History

My research focuses on the plays of Shakespeare, both in their original moment of performance and publication, and in their afterlives and legacy. My primary focus is on embodiment. My first monograph, Shakespeare"s Body Language, studies Shakespeare"s use of shaming gestures as a way of interrogating gender norms in Elizabethan and Jacobean society. More recently, my work on embodiment has extended to thinking about casting practices in productions of Shakespeare"s plays. In this, I am particularly interested in the cognitive affects of casting on audience expectation and memory, and I explore this through the intersectional lenses of race, gender, and class. This work currently manifests itself as an edited collection " The Idea of the Shakespearean Actor " and I have also published an article on the notion of how diverse casting has been used at Shakespeare"s Globe under the artistic directorships of Emma Rice and Michelle Terry. This work overlaps with my second key interest, which is Shakespeare in performance. I have been invited to propose a monograph for Arden Bloomsbury"s Shakespeare in the Theatre series, and have received an award from the FAHSS Benefactions fund to visit the archives of Shakespeare"s Globe this summer to complete this: the book will be the first history of the Globe"s first female artistic directors and how their approaches to diversity and inclusion have been received in the context of the so-called culture wars. My third interest is in editing and the dissemination of Shakespeare in textual form. I am the editor of The Tempest (2021, Arden Performance Editions), and am editing The Merry Wives of Windsor for the New Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Alternative Versions (OUP, 2025) and co-editing a special issue of Shakespeare journal on the First Folio"s first 400 years. I also work on adaptation, and in particular, novelizations of Shakespeare"s plays.