ForGED · Foreign Geographies in English Drama, c.1576-1660

Existing studies of foreign geographical settings in early modern English drama are limited by narrow focus on particular authors, sub-periods, or geographical locations. My project will, for the first time, quantify and explicate the role that non-European geographies had in shaping the production of drama in England between c.1576 and 1660. I will uncover the overall extent of non-European settings for plays, and interrogate how English drama invoked locations that were the focus of national colonialist interest, and established foreign Empires that were at once alluring and threatening to English national interests and theatre audiences alike. ForGED will make available a body of new knowledge that will help the scientific community to better understand how England’s cultural, commercial, and colonial interests in--and anxieties about--the ‘foreign’ impacted the theatre and shaped key developments in drama. I will work with Daniel Carey (Professor of English Literature and Director of the Moore Institute) at the National University of Ireland, Galway, to refine my engagement with English travel writing and colonialist literature, which has an important bearing on my research. I will receive digital humanities training from David Kelly (DH specialist at the Moore Institute) in order to develop digital methodologies for quantitative research that will enable me to organize data about my corpus of plays and perform data visualisations to identify trends pertaining to particular dramatist, theatres, years, and foreign locations. My qualitative analysis of the data will be communicated to the scientific community through conferences and peer-reviewed puplications, and to the wider community through social media, blogs, and public engagement events.