Wendy Wall is an Avalon Professor of the Humanities and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University, specialises in early modern literature and culture; food studies; gender studies; women’s writing; poetry; recipe culture; theater; and manuscript / print studies. Co-creator (with Leah Knight at Brock University) of the open access, critical edition, The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, she is also author of The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Cornell University Press, 1993), Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which was a finalist for the James Russell Lowell prize awarded by the MLA and a 2002 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award Winner; and Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Professor Wall is Director of the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern and past president of the Shakespeare Association of America. She is involved with public humanities partnerships, including teaching at Stateville Maximum Security Prison as part of the Northwestern Prison Education Program and the Prison+Neighborhood Arts Program; serving as a judge for the Chicago Shakespeare Slam; and participating in educational programs with the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, The Newberry Library, and the Chicago Humanities Festival.
Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Hertford College. Her work focuses on the reception of Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists in print, performance, and criticism. Her most recent book is This Is Shakespeare (2019). In 2016 she authenticated a new copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio found at Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute in Scotland, and published her book Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book. With Laurie Maguire she proposed in 2012 that All’s Well that Ends Well was a collaboration with Thomas Middleton. The New Oxford Shakespeare edition of 2016, edited by Bourus et al, was the first printed edition of the play to accept this joint attribution. She is the editor of Shakespeare Survey, and is currently working on a new edition of Twelfth Night for Arden, and is a contributor to the new Oxford edition of the works of Thomas Nashe.
Ray Siemens is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria Canada, in English with cross appointment in Computer Science, appointed also 2004-15 as Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing. Ray is also Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, and has been Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for English Studies London (2005, 2008) as well as Visiting Professor at Sheffield Hallam U (2004-11), Ritsumeikan U Kyoto (2010), New York U (2013), U Passau (2014), U Tokyo (2014), and Western Sydney U (2015, 2017-18), U Montreal (2018), and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at U Loughborough (2019). In 2019 he was appointed Global Innovation Chair in Digital Humanities at the University of Newcastle, Australia.
The editor of several Renaissance texts, Ray is also the founding editor of the electronic scholarly journal Early Modern Literary Studies. He has authored numerous articles on the intersection of literary studies and computational methods and is the co-editor of several book collections on humanities computing topics, among them Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities with Susan Schreibman and John Unsworth), the Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Studies (with Susan Schreibman), and MLA’s Literary Studies in the Digital Age (with Ken Price). He directs the Implementing New Knowledge Environments project, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, recently serving as a member of governing council for the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as Vice President / Director of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences (for Research Dissemination), Chair of the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions, and Chair of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.
His current literary studies work centres on two early Tudor manuscript miscellanies, the Henry VIII Manuscript (BL Add Ms 31922; Renaissance English Text Society, 2018), and the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add Ms 17492; Wikibooks, 2012, and Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2015), the latter in the context of social scholarly editing.
Early Career Research Keynote
Emily Shortslef is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include early modern drama and poetry, critical theory, and questions of affect, poetics, and aesthetics. Her work has appeared most recently in ELH, Exemplaria, and the edited collection Face-to-Face in Shakespearean Drama: Ethics, Performance, Philosophy. Her current book project, The Drama of Complaint: Ethical Provocations in Shakespeare’s Tragedy, explores the surprising intersections between Shakespeare, early modern moral philosophy, and discourses of complaint.