Confirmed Speakers

Brandi K. Adams

Brandi Adams is a groundbreaking early career scholar whose work is located on the intersections of the history of the book and race; she also researches the early history of artificial intelligence, early modern automata, and how studying literature can have a significant and positive impact on computing. Dr Adams’ scholarship presses readers to reconsider how commonplace terminology and structures of thought within the field of bibliography privilege a history of codified speculation and reproduce ideologies of race and gender that date back to early modern England. She builds on Werstine’s research into the problematic distinction between “foul papers” and “fair copy”, for example, by investigating historical associations of “fairness”. She is currently writing her first monograph, Representations of Books and Readers in Early Modern English drama (1580-1640), and co-editing Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor for the Cambridge Shakespeare Editions.

Alan Galey

Alan Galey is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed to the Department of English, and former director of the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture. His research and teaching are located at the intersection of media studies, the history of books and reading, and the digital humanities. He has won awards for both his teaching and research, including the 2013 Bowers Prize for best article in the field of textual studies. His first monograph book, The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity, was published in 2014 by Cambridge University Press. He has published articles in journals including Book History, Shakespeare Quarterly, the Canadian Journal of Communication, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Archivaria, and Archival Science. He has also contributed chapters to several scholarly edited collections, and co-edited Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures (with Travis DeCook; Routledge, 2011). His current SSHRC-supported project is called Bibliographic Methods for Born-Digital Texts: From Paratext to Performance ().

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is Professor of English at the University of Victoria.  She co-coordinates the New Internet Shakespeare Editions and Digital Renaissance Editions and directs the Humanities Computing and Media Centre at UVic (hcmc.uvic.ca), Linked Early Modern Drama Online (lemdo.uvic.ca), and The Map of Early Modern London (mapoflondon.uvic.ca). She served for three years on the Technical Council of the Text Encoding Initiative. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (Routledge). Her essays and book chapters have appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin, Elizabethan Theatre, EMLS, JMEMS, DHQ, Digital Studies, Scholarly Editing, and other venues.

Zachary Lesser

Zachary Lesser, Edward W. Kane Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of three award-winning monographs and a general editor of The Arden Shakespeare (fourth series). He is a world-leading scholar in the materiality of texts, evidenced in his recent Ghosts, Holes, Rips, and Scrapes (Penn Press, 2021), which was shortlisted for the DeLong Book History Prize. He is also the co-creator of two important digital databases, the Shakespeare Census and DEEP: Databases of Early English Playbooks, and the Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Workshop in the History of Material Texts.

Sonia Massai

Sonia Massai is the author of three monographs, including Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge, 2007), a seminal pre-history of Shakespeare editing. She has edited drama for the Arden Early Modern Drama series and is a general editor of the Cambridge Shakespeare Editions, a project that combines traditional print editions with digital texts and supporting material. Dr Massai’s exemplary knowledge of the history of Shakespearean editing, as well as her extensive experience as an editor at the vanguard of digital innovation, will contribute much to the conference’s focus on editing Shakespearean texts. Dr Massai has also published on world-wide Shakespeares and, recently, on how identity is defined through accents in performance.

Eric Rasmussen

Eric Rasmussen is an internationally renowned bibliographer and editor, with special expertise in the Shakespeare folios. Stories about his authentication of a newly discovered Shakespeare First Folio were featured in the New York Times, the Guardian, and the BBC. His book, The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios, was serialized by the London Sunday Times. He brings to the conference deep knowledge of editorial practices and challenges, having edited the Complete Works for the Royal Shakespeare Company and critical editions of individual plays for the Arden Shakespeare, Oxford’s World’s Classics, and the Revels Plays. He is a contributor to The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (named Book of the Year for 2012 by the Times Literary Supplement) and Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (named Book of the Year for 2013 by both the TLS and History Today).

Misha Teramura

Misha Teramura is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His work has been published in such journals as ELH, Shakespeare Quarterly, Modern Philology, English Literary Renaissance, RES, Early Theatre, Huntington Library Quarterly, and The Chaucer Review, and has received both the Martin Stevens Award for Best New Essay in Early Drama Studies and the Barbara Palmer Award for Best New Essay in Early Drama Archival Research. He is currently working on two book projects, titled ​Paper Plays: The Material Lives of Early Modern Manuscript Playbooks and Reading Lost Plays: Early Modern Drama and the Forms of Textual Survival, and is editing Henry IV, Part 2 for the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a co-editor of the Lost Plays Database.