About
I am a literary critic and book historian who works on the literary and material cultures of the early modern period, with particular focus on Shakespeare and editorial practice.
My first book, Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade (Oxford University Press, 2022), offered a fresh account of the most important document in the history of the Shakespearean text. People have said some nice things about this book! Some of them were in charge of awarding prizes! Other of my publications have appeared elsewhere; there is a list below that is badly in need of an update.
– Ben Higgins
Tutorial Fellow in English Literature
Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford
Publications
* Book Chapter: ‘’The Book-sellars Shop’: Browsing, Reading, and Buying in Early Modern England’ in Adam Smyth ed., The Oxford Handbook to the History of the Book in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023).
* Monograph: Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade (Oxford University Press, 2022)
* Journal Article: ‘Judith and Lucrece: Reading Shakespeare Between Copy and Work’: English Literary Renaissance 52.1 (2022): pp. 34–71 (essay selected as editors’ highlight and advertised in the TLS, 16 April 2021).
* Review: Claire M. L. Bourne, Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020). The Library 23.3 (2022): pp. 270–72.
* Review Article: David Pearson, Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2019). Times Literary Supplement, 10 April 2020.
* Journal Article: ‘‘Shackspeers playes’ and ‘Donnes Poem’: the Library of James Marsh, DD,’ The Library, March 2021, pp. 33–56.
* Review: Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale UP, 2019). Times Higher Education, No. 2,411 (6-12 June 2019) p. 50.
* Review: Emma Smith, The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio (Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2016). The Bodleian Library Record, April 2019.
* Book Chapter: ‘Printing the First Folio,’ in Emma Smith ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623), (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016), pp. 30-47.
* Review: Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016). Review of English Studies 68.283 (2017): pp. 174-175.
* Review: Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: U of Philadelphia P, 2013). Review of English Studies 65 (2014): pp. 548-550.
* Review: Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012). Review of English Studies 65 (2014): pp. 167-169.
* Blog Essay: ‘Lefties or Righties? The Handwriting of Shakespeare’s Publishers,’ in Sprint for Shakespeare: a Digital Facsimile of the First Folio (web, 2013): //shakespeare.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/2013/06/03/lefties-or-righties-the-handwriting-of- shakespeares-publishers/