Toria Johnson

I came to Birmingham in 2016, and was previously a Teaching Fellow in Renaissance Literature at the University of St Andrews.

My areas of expertise include drama, early modern culture, the history of emotions, and the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. My monograph, Pity and Identity in the Age of Shakespeare (D.S. Brewer, 2021) interrogates the impact of the Reformation on early modern English emotional culture, with a specific focus on the role of pity and compassion in defining English understandings of subjectivity and ‘social’ emotion. I have contributed essays to Compassion in Early Modern Europe 1500-1700 (2021), and Shakespeare and Emotion (2020). In 2018 I was the co-editor (with Rachel E. Holmes, UCL) of a Special Issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies entitled ‘In Pursuit of Truth: Law and Emotion in Early Modern Europe’. 

In 2017, I was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence in the History of Emotions 1100-1800 (University of Adelaide node).