Nicole Sheriko

I study Renaissance performance culture, drawing on literary studies as well as theater history, art history, performance studies, and archives of material culture. My particular interests are anchored in two big questions–How does theater work? and What is popular culture?–questions deeply entangled with the histories of archives and their gaps. I write about theater of all kinds from cycle, civic, court, and commercial drama to processional performance and puppetry. I am also interested in the afterlives of early modern drama, especially the legacies of Shakespeare in performance and material culture. I am currently completing a book about performing popular culture that examines forms of puppetry, clowning, and animal performance that rivalled and outlasted the commercial drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. I am also at work on a project about magic and medicine on the early modern stage and a collection of essays about early european puppetry.

My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Studies in English Literature, Shakespeare Studies, Nineteenth Century Studies, by invitation in the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World and Arden collections Shakespeare/Play and Early Modern Performance Beyond the Public Stage. My work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Renaissance Society of America, Shakespeare Association of America, and Folger Shakespeare, Huntington, and Bodleian Libraries. 

Before coming to Yale I was the A H Lloyd Junior Research Fellow in English at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, a post for which I was endorsed by the British Academy.