Research

Performance Review: "Much Ado About Nothing by Royal Shakespeare Company (review)" for Shakespeare Bulletin

My first academic publication, a performance review of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2025 production of Much Ado About Nothing, is forthcoming in Shakespeare Bulletin, a journal publishing on Shakespearean and early modern performance studies and theatre history.

M.A. Dissertation: "King Lear (Taylor's Version): In Speculative Jukebox Dramaturgy"

My dissertation for my M.A. in Shakespeare and Creativity at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, was an explication of the speculative jukebox dramaturgy for a proposed musical adaptation: King Lear (Taylor's Version). Employing 'jukebox' as a method of creative-critical intertextual studies, the dissertation made its argument at the intersection of Shakespeare studies and the burgeoning field of Taylor Swift studies, with a mix of feminist enquiry, autofiction, speculative performance criticism, pop-cultural studies, and literary criticism. Read my M.A. dissertation here.

Undergraduate Honors Thesis: "'This Wide Gap of Time': Adapting The Winter's Tale Post-COVID"

My undergraduate interdisciplinary honors thesis in Theatre and English at the Pennsylvania State University was a practice-based project on adapting Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale with a post-COVID focus on grief, time, and non-chronological narrative. For the project, I authored and directed reading–workshops of two adaptations of The Winter's Tale with the Penn State School of Theatre.

Leontes: A Winter's Tale (2022) is a musical play that imagines Leontes in his intermedial period of grief, wandering a cemetery by the grave of his wife and son, the specters of his story appearing before him in a pageant. Leontes remembers the loss of his family as memories that haunt him and imagines his family's restorative reunion as daydreams or fantasies—that perhaps do not actually happen. This ritual—wandering, remembering, dreaming—is one he undertakes daily. Leontes and Paulina Are Very Much Not Dead (2023) is a new play that imagines the titular characters during one such day of mourning—fighting, rueing, and ultimately realizing that they are all that each other has.

For this project, I examined the adaptation and production history of The Winter's Tale. Through an Erickson Discovery Grant from Penn State's Undergraduate Research and Fellowships Mentoring Office, and under the research supervision of Dr. Elizabeth Bonjean, I traveled to visit the archives of the National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare's Globe, and American Shakespeare Center to view performance videos of the twenty-first-century production history of The Winter's Tale. Read my undergraduate thesis here.

Poster (_The Winter's Tale__ Lab) [without QR code].jpg

Above, the poster for The Winter's Tale: Lab, an event at which a reading of Leontes: A Winter's Tale (2022) was presented, and the poster for Leontes and Paulina Are Very Much Not Dead (2023).