Cardiff University

Graduate Student, School of English, Communication, and Philosophy

PhD student and Postgraduate Tutor in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (ENCAP)

Thesis Title: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: Audience Expectation and Matters of Taste

About

Please see the department website for my contact information: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/degreeprogrammes/postgraduateresearch/currentphdtopics/pgstudents/gregory.html

I am currently completing my English Literature PhD at Cardiff University supervised by Prof Richard Wilson and Dr Irene Morra. The focus of my PhD is Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, historicising the play within its theatrical and literary fields, and theorising the play's use of audience expectation.

My research responds to the (re)turn in literary scholarship – particularly in Shakespeare studies – to the subject of audience and readers. It examines the way that Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida disconcertingly frames its audience by staging audience figures and utilising a language of taste. Images of food and cooking are employed metaphorically in the play to discuss the judgement and expectations of an audience, the thesis argues, at least half a century before “taste” becomes normalised towards the end of the seventeenth century as a normative term for aesthetic and social judgements. The thesis employs Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field to gauge the way that Shakespeare’s play engages with its theatrical and literary environment, and resituates Bourdieu’s work on taste and social positioning to consider how Shakespeare’s Trojan play responds to the contingencies of audience expectation. This was an expectation for a story with famous classical, medieval and contemporary precedents, for a play to be performed by the leading theatre company of the day, written by a playwright who was also conscious of his role as a published author. The research speaks to the play’s own traversing of elite and popular culture, and the questions of legitimacy, pleasure, reputation and value that stem from this performance.

I completed my BA and MA at Cardiff University using the work of Jacques Derrida to write my MA dissertation on "Guests, ghosts and hosts in Shakespearean tragedy: the limits of hospitality in performance"

My research interests lie in how Shakespeare’s texts represent ideas about literature on the stage, but this includes "everything and the rest". I am especially interested in:

Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
Shakespeare and Audience Expectations
Shakespeare and the Sense of the Authorship
Shakespeare and Matters of Taste
Shakespeare and Theory
Shakespeare and Assuming Gender
Teaching Shakespeare


Conferences

I co-organised the one-day conference "Islands of Thought: Early-Modern Mentalities and Politics" in 2008 (see teaching documents).

I have presented papers at:

* Assuming Gender, Cardiff University
* The Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-Upon-Avon
* Medieval and Early Modern Authorship, Geneva University
* Derrida Today, London
* Research Paper, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff
* Société Française Shakespeare, Paris
* Shakespeare: Sources and Adaptation, Cambridge University

This year I will present a paper on "John Taylor and the 'willful women'" at the Université de Provence for their conference: "Transmission and Transgression in Early Modern England".


In 2011 I curated a small exhibition on "Healthy Reading 1590-1690: exhibiting a healthy context for the first publisher's blurb to a Shakespeare play" using Cardiff University's Special Collections: http://bit.ly/hLwFtz


I created and manage the website: http://cardiffshakespeare.wordpress.com/

CardiffShakes: http://twitter.com/CardiffShakes

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PUBLICATIONS

Please see "Papers" in the side bar.

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ACADEMIC HISTORY

2006-7 Cardiff University
MA (Distinction) English Literature
Dissertation title: Guests, Ghosts and Hosts in Shakespearean Tragedy: the limits of hospitality in performance

2003-6 Cardiff University
BA (First Class Honours) English Literature

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TEACHING at Cardiff University

Postgraduate Tutor for
Shakespeare's Tragedies Spring, 2012

Postgradute Tutor in
Medieval and Renaissance Literature 2010-11

Postgraduate Tutor in
Medieval and Renaissance Literature 2009-10

Postgraduate Tutor in English Literature 2008-09

TEACHING at University of Wales Institute, Cardiff 2011 (see "Talks")

TEACHING at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama as a part-time lecturer in theatre history (see "Teaching Documents")

Following the successful completion of Cardiff University's *Learning to Teach* discipline-based professional development programme, I have been an Associate of the Higher Education Academy since 2011.

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AWARDS

Edward Rhys-Price Studentship (£1000)
(Cardiff University part-time PhD student wide endowment "based on the candidates' relative merits and research potential" 2010/11)

Various research / conference travel awards, including travel award from Freie Universität Berlin for the international conference - "Performing the Poetics of Passion: Troilus & Cressida / Troilus & Criseyde" in May 2010

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I am a member of the British Shakespeare Association (09/10, 10/11, 11/12), and the Société Française Shakespeare (10/11)

Contact Information