Dr Rory Loughnane

Dr Rory Loughnane is Reader in Early Modern Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

He is an award-winning scholar of early modern textual studies, authorship, intellectual history, theatre history, and literary criticism. In 2017 he was awarded the Faculty of Humanities Prize for Starting Research for his contribution to The New Oxford Shakespeare edition (see below). In 2019 he was awarded the Charles and Rose G. Hoffman Prize for distinguished work in Marlowe studies. In 2020 he was a Francis Bacon Foundation Fellow at The Huntington Library, California. In 2022 he will be a Plumer Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford. His research is or has been supported by funding bodies such as the IRC, AHRC, and ESRC.

He is a General Editor of The Revels Plays series for Manchester University Press. He also co-edits two monograph series: Studies in Early Modern Authorship for Routledge, with Laurie Maguire and Heather A. Hirschfeld; and Shakespeare and Text for Cambridge University Press, with Claire M. L. Bourne. He and Brett Greatley-Hirsch are General Editors of CADRE: Co-Authored Drama in Renaissance England, a database about co-authored plays and entertainments.

Dr Loughnane is an Associate Editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare, editing ten plays and co-editing another for the edition. Plays he has edited, in both original and modern spelling, include 2 Henry VI, Edward III, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Henry V, All’s Well that Ends Well, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Tempest, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. For the Authorship Companion to the edition, he co-authored with Gary Taylor a book-length study about ‘The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s works’ and, in a series of attribution studies, he first identified Thomas Middleton as adapter of All’s Well that Ends Well.

He has published extensively in early modern studies, including seven essay collections and the landmark critical anthology The Memory Arts in Renaissance England (Cambridge University Press, 2016). His essay collections include Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613 (Cambridge University Press, 2013; re-issued 2015), Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers (Ashgate, 2013; re-issued 2017), Staged Transgression in Shakespeare’s England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Staged Normality in Shakespeare’s England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and Early Shakespeare, 1588-1594 (Cambridge University Press, 2020). He publishes regularly in journals such as The Review of English Studies, The Yearbook of English Studies, Critical Survey, and Shakespeare Studies, and has contributed to major studies such as A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (2016), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Tragedy (2016), and The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory (2017). 

Dr Loughnane is currently at work on several research projects:

• The Oxford Marlowe: Collected Works (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), gen. ed. Rory Loughnane, Catherine Richardson, and Sarah Dustagheer. A new multi-volume edition of the works of Christopher Marlowe involving scholars from around the globe. Related Digital Humanities research activities include the Reassembling Marlowe project (with Aaron T. Pratt, Rob Carson, and Douglas Bruster) and the Materializing Marlowe project (with Laura Estill).
• The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Authorship (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), ed. Rory Loughnane and Will Sharpe. A 50+ essay collection.
• Shakespeare At Thirty (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). A monograph about Shakespeare’s beginnings in theatre.
• The Death Arts in Renaissance England (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), William E. Engel, Rory Loughnane, Grant Williams. An anthology with 60+ entries and 20+ images and figures.
• Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), ed. William E. Engel, Rory Loughnane, Grant Williams. An essay collection drawn from a 2019 conference at The Warburg Institute.
• The Works of Cyril Tourneur, The Revels Plays (Manchester University Press, forthcoming), ed. Rory Loughnane. The first edition of Tourneur’s works since 1930.
• The New Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Alternative Versions (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Editing The Spanish Tragedy and Troilus and Cressida (Q1), and co-editing, with Gary Taylor, Othello (Q1).

He is represented by Eleanor Birne at Patrick E. Walsh Literary Agency.

Born and raised in Co. Clare, Republic of Ireland, he undertook BA and PhD studies at Trinity College Dublin. He was then awarded an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the same university, which he cut short to join Syracuse University as a Visiting Assistant Professor. He next moved to Indiana University-Indianapolis to join the New Oxford Shakespeare editorial team. He joined the University of Kent in the summer of 2016. Dr Loughnane is a dual citizen of Ireland and the USA. 

Dr Loughnane’s research interests fall, broadly, into four areas:

• Editing and Textual Studies
• Authorship (practices of, attribution studies)
• History of Ideas (memory, death, love, rhetoric, conduct)
• Literary Criticism (transgression and normality, nationality, feminism and gender studies)  

Dr Loughnane would welcome the opportunity to speak to any prospective graduate students interested in the following areas of study:

• Early Modern Literature and Drama
• Editing and Textual Studies (1500-1700)
• Authorship (practices of, attribution studies)
• History of Ideas (memory, death, love, rhetoric, conduct)
• Literary Criticism (transgression and normality, nationality, feminism and gender studies)
• Digital Humanities  

• Shakespeare Association of America (2020 planning committee)
• Renaissance Society of America
• Malone Society
• Marlowe Society of America