Anna Hegland is a PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies and School of English. Her research focuses on language and violence in early modern tragedies, and explores the intersections of rhetoric, materiality, and performance on the English stage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
She received her MA (distinction) in Shakespeare Studies from the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute (2016). Anna is an administrator for and member of the Cultures of Performance in Medieval and Early Modern Europe research cluster (https://research.kent.ac.uk/performancecultures/), and organizes the postgraduate-led Coffee House seminars, an interdisciplinary series of workshops and discussions for early modernists at Kent. She is currently the postgraduate research student rep for the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
PhD Research Title
The Language of Violence in Early Modern Revenge Drama
Professional Experience/Conference Papers
Paper. ‘O blessed object’: Words, Bodies, and ‘Things’ in Early Modern Revenge Drama. Durham IMEMS conference (2019)
Review. Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (2017). Symbolism (De Gruyter), 18 (2018), 202-206
Blog posts for Canterbury Cathedral (2019) and Cultures of Performance (2017-2019)
Performance Workshop for Cultures of Performance (2018)
Seminar. Reading Domestic Drama: ‘Tom Tyler and his Wife’. Coffee House seminar series (2018)
Paper. Resistance and Revenge in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam. Durham IMEMS conference (2018)
Paper. Speaking Death and Dying Listening in Early Modern Revenge Tragedies. British Graduate Shakespeare Conference (2018)
Paper. Objectified Bodies in Middleton’s The Second Maiden’s Tragedy. Making Connections: Early Modern Texts and Cultures conference (2018)
Seminar. ‘Be thou true’: Pronominal Address in Early Modern Drama. Coffee House seminar series (2018)
Paper. Wordborne Contagion in Troilus and Cressida. Oxford-Globe Forum for Medicine and Drama in Practice (2017)
Grants/Funding/Honours
Conference Bursary, awarded by The Society for Renaissance Studies and the British Graduate Shakespeare Conference (2018)
Vice-Chancellor’s Research Scholarship, awarded by The University of Kent, School of English and Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2017 – 2020)
Academically focused website
Research interests include revenge drama; Stuart drama; practice as research; rhetoric and performance; and disease on the early modern stage. Anna is also active in the Cultures of Performance in Medieval and Early Modern Europe research cluster, a member of the Early Drama Network, and a peer-reviewer for The Shakespeare Institute Review.
Anna currently teaches on the undergraduate module EN694 - Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, and has also taught on the undergraduate module EN692 - Literature and Life: 1400 - 1700.
Professor Catherine Richardson and Dr Sarah Dustagheer