Directory

Elizabeth E. Tavares, PhD, (she/her) is an interdisciplinary scholar of early modern English drama, whose research foci include playing companies, theatre history, and Shakespeare in performance. She is currently at work on her first book manuscript, “Playing the Repertory in Early Modern England,” which, in tracing the development of the sixteenth-century repertory system, demonstrates how four major tacks—triptych blocking, up-cycled props, tailored soundscapes, and racialized prosthetics—were employed by companies to distinguish their relative house styles and, by extension, cultivate returner audiences.

Tavares’s recent interests range from the role climatological phenomena played in the emergence of the professional playing companies and the place of victualing houses in sixteenth-century new play development, to the effects of content curation on early (modern) habits of mind. In addition to long-term collaborative book projects on these topics, she is developing digital humanities tools for purposes pedagogical and archival. Recent student-driven digital projects include Othello’s Crane: A Twitter Play (2017), Aphra Behn: The Podcast (2021), and a forthcoming mobile game for practicing scansion, SyllaBits, in collaboration with the department of Computer Science.

A three-time Mellon Foundation fellow, Tavares has received research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities; societies for Theatre Research and Renaissance Studies; and the Newberry, Folger, and Huntington libraries. Tavares’s prize-winning scholarship has appeared in or is forthcoming from Early Theatre, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Shakespeare Studies, among others, as well as several edited collections. A regular book and performance reviewer, Tavares has also contributed to numerous academic blogs, such as Humanities for All and Before Shakespeare, as well as vlogs and podcasts.

Tavares serves as director of research for the Alabama Shakespeare Project, a performance-based research collective exploring early modern entertainments through a staged reading series and other events. Other dramaturgy credits include a three-woman Macbeth at Portland Center Stage; consultancy with the Back Room Shakespeare Project and Original Practice Shakespeare Festival; Artists Repertory Theatre’s Feathers & Teeth, Magellanica, Teenage Dick, and The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart; as well as numerous audience-engagement lectures and post-show talk-balks.

UA Affiliations

• Alabama Shakespeare Project
• Collaborative Arts Research Initiative
• Emerging Scholars Program
• Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies
• Medieval & Early Modern European Studies
• UA in Oxford Study Abroad Program

Graduate Mentorship

An avid teacher and mentor, Tavares has developed courses in and lectured on British literature and history, ecodrama, Shakespeare in repertory, curation culture, critical race theory, and hashtag activism. Her mentees have pursued thesis projects bridging the discourses of dance, embodiment, and the Victorian novel; exploring the affective affordances of Sherlock Holmes fan fiction; teaching the many lives of King Henry VII; and tracing the history of editing grief in early modern dramatic representations of male mourning, among others. She is interested in mentoring graduate students looking to work on projects in theatre history, early modern performance, embodiment, ecocriticism, performance-based research and dramaturgy, Shakespeare in contemporary performance, and digital humanities. Interested? Get in touch!

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9410-190X

Special Issues

• “Props in Repertory” with L. Johnson and E. MacLeod (under review)
• “Issues in Review: Playing in Repertory” with L. Johnson, Early Theatre 25, no. 2 (forthcoming, 2022)
• “Fight or Flyte: Pride and Masculinity in the Middle Ages,” IJURCA 11, no. 3 (2019)

Articles

• “‘On pleasures past, and dangers to ensue’: Site-Specific Violence and the Post-Renovation Rose Repertory” (in progress)
• “John Shakespeare’s Muckhill: Ecologies, Economies, and Biographies of Communal Waste in Stratford-upon-Avon, c. 1550–1600” with D. Fallow (under review)
• “The #OthelloSyllabus: Twitter as Play” with S. Ballou, Hybrid Pedagogy (2020)
• “Matisse in the Playhouse,” #NextGenPlen, Shakespeare Studies 47 (2019): 127–33
• “Super Troupers; or, Supplemented Playing before 1594,” Shakespeare Studies 45 (2017): 77–86
• “A Tale of Two Shrews: Recovering the Repertory of the Lord Pembroke’s Players,” The Journal of the Wooden O 15 (2016): 84–95
• “The Chariot in 2 Tamburlaine, The Wounds of Civil War or Marius and Scilla, and The Reign of King Edward III,” Notes & Queries 63, no. 3 (2016): 393–96
• “A Race to the Roof: Cosmetics and Contemporary Histories in the Elizabethan Playhouse, 1592–1596,” Shakespeare Bulletin 34, no. 2 (2016): 193–217

Chapters

• “Alive in the (early) modern repertory,” Early Modern Liveness, eds. D. Rosvally and D. Sherman (under review)
• “Cham’s Beard and Tartar’s Bow: Staging Mongolia after the Elizabethan Repertory,” Reprints and Revivals of Renaissance Drama, eds. E. Price and H. Newman (under review)
• “Fistfights and Sacrifice: Troupe Dynamics, Transformation, and Shakespeare Offstage,” Slings & Arrows: Performing Shakespeare as Canada, eds. K. Wright and D. Moore (accepted)
• “Playing Companies and Repertories,” The Arden Handbook to Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, eds. T. Rutter and M. M. Dowd (in press)
• “Claire Kens Well: Appropriation and Itinerant Performance in Outlander Onscreen,” Outlander’s Sassenachs: Essays on Gender, Race, Orientation, and the Other in the Novels and Television Series, ed. V. Frankel, 31–43 (McFarland & Company, 2016)

Reference

• “The Sun Tavern (The Sonne),” The Map of Early Modern London, ed. J. Jenstad (2020)
• “A Semi-Diplomatic Transcription of Selections from the John Ward Diaries, vol. 10 (1663–1665),” The Collation: Research and Exploration at the Folger Shakespeare Library, ed. H. Wolfe (2020)

Blogs

• “Making the Covert Public,” Humanities for All blog, eds. M. May-Curry and Y. Oliver, National Humanities Alliance (2021)
• “Genre and the Elizabethan Troupe,” Before Shakespeare: The Beginnings of London Commercial Theatre 1565–1595 blog, eds. C. Davies, A. Kesson, and L. Munro (2017)

Awards

• Arnold L. and Lois S. Graves Prize for Teaching in the Humanities, ACLS (2020)
• Provost’s Junior Faculty Award for Scholarship, Pacific University (2020)
• Barbara Palmer Prize for Best New Essay in Archival Research, MRDS (2017)
• Prize for Research in the Humanities, Illinois Humanities Research Institute (2016)
• H. L. and M. K. Peer Dissertation Prize (inaugural), University of Illinois (2016)

Fellowships

• Collaborative Arts Research Initiative Faculty Fellowship (2021–23)
• National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (2019)
• Folger Shakespeare Library Paleography Institute Fellowship (2019)
• Huntington Library Short-Term Fellowship (2018)
• Early Modern Conversions Fellowship, McGill University (2017)
• Mellon Harvard School for Theatre and Performance Research Fellowship (2015)
• Mellon Academy for Advanced Study in the Renaissance Fellowship (2014)

Media

• “Coriolanus,” The Show Must Go Online (2020)
• “Macbeth” & “Much Ado About Nothing,” Shakespeare 2020 Project (2020)
• “No 33. Shakespeare & Contemporary Theatre-Making,” A Bit Lit (2020)
• “Foolish Voices: Elizabeth E. Tavares,” Foolish Voices: A Company of Fools Podcast (2020)
• “Ops Cast No. 10: Elizabeth Tavares,” OpsCast (2017)

UA News

• Faculty Profile: Professor Elizabeth E. Tavares, The Scarlet Newsletter (Mar 2021)
• CARI announces 2021-2022 Faculty Fellows (Dec 2020)
• Rediscovering the Renaissance: UA Professor Researching Meeting Places of Playwrights (Nov 2020)