PhD Candidate and Instructor
Department of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Hi there—you seem to have found your way to my professional web portfolio. I'm Elizabeth, a doctoral candidate working on early Renaissance drama in the English department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My own scholarly interests include popular playing company repertories, audience cultures, performance studies and the theatre's history in the early modern period. Depending on your interests, however, there are a couple of different ways to read this site.

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If you are of the scholarly temper, check out the research page with its links to my scholarly work, publications, and conference materials. The blog, BiteThumbnails: A Playgoer's Notebook, contains performance reviews, research tangents, and editorials of an academic vein that may also be of interest. If you are one of my students (or potential employers), the teaching page includes schedules, sample teaching materials, and links to online course environments.

My background in history and cultural studies has led to interdisciplinary interests in ecocriticism, digital humanities, and collaborative pedagogy. For now, however, my time and efforts are predominantly invested in the early writing stages of my dissertation project, tentatively titled Sovereignty and the Common in Renaissance Repertory, 1583-1594. Its aim is to apply a comparative approach to analyzing the theatrical experiences playing companies cultivated by tracing the competing rhetorics of status groups and the cultural fantasies of sovereignty they provide. You can find me tweeting regularly on these and new projects, theatre, and other early modern topics as @ElizETavares.