Project Team

• Principal Investigator
• University of Roehampton

Dr Andy Kesson is a Reader in Renaissance Literature at the University of Roehampton, the author of John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship, the co-editor, with Emma Smith, of The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England, and the editor of the Shakespeare Studies 45 (2017) special issue on 1580s drama. He was the principal investigator for Before Shakespeare, and is currently working with the theatremaker Emma Frankland on a diversity-positive production of John Lyly’s Galatea. He also runs A Bit Lit, a public forum celebrating research and creativity of all kinds.

• Dr Andy Kesson, University of Roehampton

• Lecturer in Seventeenth-Century Literature and Culture
• University of Southampton

Dr Callan Davies works across early modern literary, cultural, and theatre history; he’s Lecturer in Seventeenth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of Southampton. His previous book, What is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520-1620, is an accessible account of the playhouse across early modern England (2023). He is a winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize 2025; the funding award will support his future research and writing on the Curtain and a popular history due out 2027 with Yale, The Curtain: The Story of a Shakespearean Playhouse. He’s part of the Box Office Bears project (researching animal sports in early modern England) (on which he was formerly Research Fellow at Roehampton), as well as the Middling Culture team examining early modern status, creativity, writing, and material culture, and the Before Shakespeare team. He is the Editor of the Curtain playhouse records for Records of Early English Drama’s Records of Early English Drama REED London Online. His first monograph, Strangeness in Jacobean Drama (2021), was shortlisted for the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award (2023). His article on bowling alleys and playhouses in sixteenth century London for Early Theatre won the MRDS Barbara Palmer Award 2020, and he has pieces recently released or forthcoming on middling community and Bristol’s Wine Street playhouse for English Historical Review; prose and playing for The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Nashe; a recently-published collection on early modern ephemera with Hannah Lilley and Catherine Richardson; and the introduction for the new Oxford World’s Classics The Merry Wives of Windsor.

• Dr Callan Davies, University of Roehampton

• Co-Investigator
• King's College London

Dr Lucy Munro took her BA in English Language and Literature at Manchester University, moving to King’s College London for her MA and PhD. She worked at the University of Reading and Keele University, where she taught for the English, Film and Media degree programmes, before returning to King’s in September 2013.

She is Secretary of the Marlowe Society of America, Publicity Officer for the Malone Society, and a member of the Architecture Research Group at Shakespeare’s Globe and the steering group of the London Renaissance Seminar.

• Dr Lucy Munro, King's College London