People

Dr Emma Whipday

Dr Emma Whipday is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Newcastle University. She researches gender, power, and family in early modern culture. Her first book, Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home (Cambridge University Press, 2019), won the 2020 Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award. Her essay collection, Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England (edited with Simon Smith), has recently been published (Cambridge, 2022), and her second book, Teaching Shakespeare and His Sisters, is forthcoming from Cambridge. Emma is writing the introduction to the new Oxford World Classics edition of Measure for Measure (2023). She regularly stages practice-as-research productions and workshops of early modern plays.

Emma is also a playwright. Her play Shakespeare’s Sister (Samuel French, 2016) won the Theatre Royal Haymarket’s 2015 Masterclass ‘Pitch Your Play’ Award, and was produced by the American Shakespeare Center (ASC) in 2017. She has written two Austen adaptations for the ASC: Sense and Sensibility (Samuel French, 2018) and Emma. Her play The Defamation of Cicely Lee won the ASC Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries competition in 2019. Her plays have been produced in drama schools and schools in the US and UK, and her short plays have appeared in an Old Vic New Voices showcase, and at Old Vic Tunnels. She is an AHRC BBC New Generation Thinker 2022.

https://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/people/profile/emmawhipday.html