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 interests are anchored around two key questions—How does theater work? and Why do people play?—questions that take me from rare book libraries and museums to backstage prop stores and reconstructed theater spaces. 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 medieval precursors to and afterlives of early modern drama, especially the legacies of Shakespeare. My current work investigates object performance as a culturally central but critically marginal element of early English performance. I am currently completing a book about early English puppetry’s forms of performance interactivity and a volume of essays on Early European Puppetry Studies as a field. Other ongoing research concerns animal performance, dragons, popular entertainment, and clowning, which will be the subject of my next book.

My work has appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Studies in English Literature, Shakespeare Studies, Nineteenth Century Studies, the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World, and Arden collections Shakespeare/Play and Early Modern Performance Beyond the Public Stage. Recent essays have won awards from the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society, the American Society for Theater Research, and UNIMA-USA. My research 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.

updated August 2024