For my PhD, I am researching the use of material objects (clothes, jewellery, portraits, effigies, monuments etc.) in approaching death, grief, and memory in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre.

I'm interested in early modern ideas of performance, materiality, and embodiment, and how they anticipate recent thinking on the enmeshed cognitive and emotional relations between minds, bodies, and material environments (namely 'Extended Mind' approaches in cognitive philosophy, and the use of objects in bereavement rituals and counselling). I also look at the reasons why early modern culture was so interested in investigating our complex interactions with material things, and how and why the theatre was particularly well equipped to playfully experiment with these interactions. 

Writers of interest include Webster, Kyd, Middleton, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher.

I am currently funded by the SWW DTP (under AHRC), and supervised by Dr Lesel Dawson and Dr Tamsin Badcoe at Bristol, and Prof Giovanna Colombetti at Exeter.