Dr Sarah Lewis

Sarah joined the English Department as a Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature in September 2013. Prior to that she was an AHRC post-doctoral researcher at King’s College London, working on the Shakespeare400 quatercentenary project. After being awarded her doctoral thesis in 2012 and before joining King’s, she was a Teaching Fellow in Early Modern Literature at University College Dublin. She has also taught as a visiting lecturer at Shakespeare's Globe, Roehampton University and at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

She completed her BA in English Literature and Language at the University of Leeds and her MA in Early Modern Literature at King’s College London, before receiving an AHRC grant to complete her PhD, also at King’s College London.

Research Interests

• Early modern drama
• Time and temporality in early modern literature and culture
• Early modern gender politics
• Family politics in early modern literature and culture
• Kairos – opportunity and right-timing in performance and culture

 

Dr Lewis has co-edited a collection of essays, Family Politics in Early Modern Literature (Palgrave, 2017), and her monograph, Time and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (CUP, 2020) analyses the cultural and theatrical intersections of early modern temporal concepts and gendered identities. Dr Lewis is currently a co-director of the research network, Grasping Kairos, a group of scholars working across disciplines, geographies and time periods to further our understanding of the cultural, political, literary, artistic, philosophical, theological and historical construction of the opportune moment. She is particularly interested in the tension between moment and duration on the early modern stage. Dr Lewis is a member of the Performance@King’s network, and is a co-convener of the London Shakespeare Seminar (2020-21).

Dr Lewis is happy to discuss PhD proposals relating to any aspect of early modern literature and culture, particularly projects which engage with gender and family politics, or with temporality and time as they are negotiated on the early modern stage.

For more details, please see her full research profile.

Teaching

Dr Lewis teaches a range of modules focused on the literature of the early modern period (including drama, poetry and prose works) across all undergraduate and post-graduate levels in the Department. Dr Lewis also convenes the Early Modern Research Forum at King’s; a series of seminars taught by PhD students and attended by MA students across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She is currently working as part of the CREATES Erasmus+ Strategic partnership, dedicated to contributing to the reform of Higher Education in Europe. Dr Lewis is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Authority.

Expertise and Public Engagement

In 2016, Dr Lewis led a project with The British Library and Shakespeare’s Globe to produce a MOOC, Shakespeare: Print and Performance, which has now reached 18,000+ learners from 120+ countries around the world. She is a speaker at the annual KCL Shakespeare Teacher’s Day conference, and has contributed to Birkbeck’s ‘Shakespeare Teachers’ Conversation’ series. Dr Lewis was also the Academic Project Manager of the Shakespeare400 project at King's, in which role she regularly represented the university and the London Shakespeare Centre in meetings with the wide range of London’s cultural organisations who are part of the consortium of Shakespeare400 partners, including the Barbican, National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Opera House, the British Library and the London Symphony Orchestra.