Penelope Woods

Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex
Dr Pen Woods is currently a Lecturer in Drama and European Literature at the University of Essex. She specialises in early modern and current theatre spectatorship, focusing on the flipside of performance studies to examine the significance of the reception of drama and how audiences produce the meanings and legacies of art both now and in the past. She collaborated with Shakespeare's Globe and Queen Mary University of London on a PhD project on Globe Audiences from 2007-2012 and was appointed to a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Australian Centre for Excellence for the History of the Emotions at the University of Western Australia 2012-2015. She was awarded a SLAM Fellowship to spend a year at Sydney University. Between 2014-2016 she received funding from CHE and Shakespeare's Globe to accompany the Globe to Globe Hamlet World Tour and collaborated with Dr. Malcolm Cocks on the compilation of the largest global audience data set for one production. From 2015-2021 she was a Lecturer in Drama at Queen Mary University of London, spending six months at The Graduate Centre, in the City University of New York. In 2022 she was appointed to a temporary position as Lecturer of Early Modern Studies at Newcastle University. As well as a historian of performance, audience and spectatorship, Woods is a cultural theorist of affect and a historian of the emotions with a focus on how emotions underpin the social and cultural scripts we live by and how we can intervene in these. As part of this research and education-led activism she co-founded the organisation Poetry Vs Colonialism with Poet Laila Sumpton and Professor of Education Victoria de Rijke which works with arts and heritage organisations, schools and Universities using poetry workshops as a springboard for processing the legacies of colonialism in society and the arts and forging new futures. She is currently finalising the manuscript of her first book The Audience at Shakespeare's Globe. Her next project is on the spectatorship of weather both now and in the past.