Erin Sullivan

I studied for a BA in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, after which I moved to England on a Fulbright postgraduate scholarship to study for an MA in Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute. I completed my PhD at University College London, where I held the Roy Porter Memorial Studentship and was jointly affiliated with the English department and the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. I took up my post at Birmingham in 2010.

I am fascinated by the intersection of culture, community, identity, and the arts, both in Shakespeare's time and today. This wide-reaching interest has resulted in a number of different research areas, including the history of emotion, contemporary performance studies, digital culture, and the philosophy of teaching. 

My first book, Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England, explores the medical, religious, and philosophical 'scripts' that helped shape the understanding of emotion in Shakespeare's time. At the same time, it considers how literary and dramatic writing, including Shakespeare's plays, playfully reimagine those scripts in creative and improvisatory ways. I have published articles and chapters in the field of the history of emotion and am a general editor of Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. 

My second book, Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice, responds to the growing impact of digital technology on theatrical culture and Shakespeare's plays. It looks at the live broadcasting, the use of live film on the stage, and experiments in born-digital theatre-making. This work is part of a wider interest in Shakespeare and adaptation, which also informs my work as a general editor for Palgrave's Reproducing Shakespeare series.

Although these research interests often take me in very different directions, I am hoping to bring them together in my next major research project, the Arden Shakespeare fourth edition of All's Well That Ends Well. All's Well is a play full of difficult characters and uncomfortable feelings, and artists have found partial resolutions to some of the problems it poses through adaptation. 

PhD (UCL)

PGCert in Academic Practice (Open University)

MA (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)

BA (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)