Dr Amy Lidster

Research and Teaching

My principal research interests are in Shakespeare and early modern literature, with an emphasis on performance practices, book history, wartime culture, and the global reception and afterlives of texts. My research often involves interdisciplinary approaches that show how texts participate in the construction of genre, historical narrative, and ideas of belonging and community. I enjoy exploring the interplay between literature and history, including how written histories make use of literary techniques and narrativizing strategies and how literature engages with history and helps to construct it. 

My first monograph, Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers Shaping a Genre (Cambridge University Press, 2022), offers a reappraisal of the ‘history play’ and draws attention to the assumptions that underlie discussions of the genre, particularly in relation to the critical dominance of Shakespeare’s English histories. My book shows how the publication process and its agents have controlled the survival of drama from the commercial stages and shaped the plays’ presentation in print in ways that both disclose and direct readings of ‘history’.

My second monograph, Wartime Shakespeare: Performing Narratives of Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2023), considers how Shakespeare has been used  – or ‘mobilized’ – in performance during periods of war from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. It accompanies a collection called Shakespeare at War: A Material History (CUP 2023), which I co-edited with Sonia Massai and features chapters from a wide range of cross-disciplinary contributors, including Shakespeare scholars, social scientists, public military figures (such as Colonel Tim Collins and Major General Jonathan Shaw), and theatre directors (including Maria Aberg, Nicholas Hytner, Iqbal Khan, Julia Pascal, and Maggie Smales). The collection doubles as a companion for ‘Shakespeare and War’, a public exhibition that we curated at the National Army Museum. You can read more about the project through this feature for Oxford's Spotlight on Research. 

My third monograph – Authorships and Authority in Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts (Routledge, forthcoming) – examines playbook paratexts as a critical site for negotiating and developing ideas of ‘authorship’, imitation, and influence during the period. In addition to these book projects, I am the author of many articles and chapters on topics linked to early modern book history, the porous boundary between literature and history during early modernity, and wartime culture across the longue durée. I am co-editing Edward III for LEMDO and preparing the introduction for the new Oxford World's Classics edition of 1 Henry VI. 

At Oxford, I teach English literature from 1550 to 1830 at faculty and college level. I also enjoy teaching courses that bridge classical and English literature, including the ‘Epic’, ‘Tragedy’, and ‘Comedy’ papers for Classics and English students. At graduate level, I teach on the early modern MSt strand and have created and taught the optional C-course ‘Early Modern Women in Print, 1550-1700’. I offer dissertation supervision for undergraduate and graduate students.