Professor Clare McManus

Professor

School: Humanities and Social Sciences

I came to Northumbria in 2023 from the University of Roehampton in London, where I was Professor of Early Modern Literature and Theatre, and founder and Director of the Research Centre for Inclusive Humanities.

Prior to that, I taught at Queen's University Belfast, the University of Wales Bangor, the University of Warwick, and the University of Birmingham. I have been visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at El Paso.

Email Clare

Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

I specialise in English and European Renaissance drama, particularly in gender and performance. One strand of my research challenges the exclusion of female-identified and gender nonconforming performers from the histories of early modern theatre. My books include Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, 1590-1619 (Manchester University Press, 2002) and the edited collection Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and I have written articles on the topic for Shakespeare Bulletin, Literature Compass and Modern Philology. I am currently completing a monograph on the effects of early modern women’s rope-dancing and tumbling on the plays of the Shakespearean canon.

As part of this work, I am a member of two international projects.

With Prof. Peter Cockett (McMaster University, Canada), Prof. Melinda Gough (McMaster University, Canada) and Prof. Lucy Munro (King’s College London) I am part of Engendering the Stage (https://engenderingthestage.humanities.mcmaster.ca), and Principal Investigator for the Leverhulme Trust funded project, Engendering the Stage: Records of Early Modern Performance (2020-23), based at Roehampton and at King’s College London. Using performance-based, archival and theoretical models of research, we seek to reconfigure the history of gender and early modern performance, uncovering the diversity of early modern performance cultures and relating this directly to the politics of access and representation in today’s Shakespeare theatre industry. To date, we have collaborated with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Ontario, details of which are on our website, and with Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre for a Research in Action event.

I am also a longstanding member of the Theater Without Borders International Working Group, based in NYU and led by Prof. Susanne Wofford (https://www.nyu.edu/projects/theaterwithoutborders/index.html). Our research investigates the transnational networks of exchange, transmission and dissemination of early modern theatre, actively working to bring scholars who work on English, French, German, Italian and Spanish theatre into dialogue.

I am also an editor of Shakespearean drama – this is where I bring together my interests in performance, textual history and gender. I have edited John Fletcher’s Island Princess (Arden Early Modern Drama, 2013), William Shakespeare’s Othello for The Norton Shakespeare 3^rd Edition (2015), James Shirley’s Bird in a Cage for The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama John Marston’s The Fawn, with José Perez Diez, for The Complete Works of John Marston (OUP, forthcoming); and I am currently editing Fletcher and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen for the Arden Shakespeare 4^th Series.

I have held fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Casting The Roaring Girl: Embodied Skill, History, and Lived Experience, McManus, C. 5 Nov 2025, Engendering the Stage in the Age of Shakespeare and Beyond, Toronto, Canada, University of Toronto Press
Engendering the Stage: Women and Dramatic Culture, McManus, C., Munro, L. 15 Dec 2022, The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, Bloomsbury
James Shirley, The Bird in a Cage: First performed 1633: First printed 1633, McManus, C. 10 Mar 2020, The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, London, Taylor & Francis
Early Modern Women’s Performance and the Dramatic Canon, McManus, C. 2019

PGR Supervision

Ella Muir Cosmopolitan clothing and sixteenth-century queenship: Katherine of Aragon, Claude de France, Anne Boleyn and Éléonore d’Autriche Start Date: 01/07/2024
Honor Parish Femininity, race-making and gender non-conformity in Queen Henrietta Maria’s court performances (1625-42) Start Date: 01/10/2025
Rachel Breckon Mixed-Race Literacy in Early Modern Travel Plays: A Blue Humanities Approach Start Date: 01/10/2025

Further Information

Ph.D. supervisions

I am always happy to hear from prospective doctoral students looking to work on early modern theatre, with interests in gender, text and/or performance broadly defined. Please get in touch if you wish to discuss a proposal.

Current supervisions include a creative-critical CDA with Shakespeare’s Globe and a transnational study of early modern queenship and clothing. Successful past supervisions include PhDs on sugar and early modern femininity; the intersections of gender and disability; porous early modern masculinities; materiality and the evidence of early modern performance; Brutan histories in early modern drama, and a CDA with Royal Museums Greenwich, on the courts of the Stuart consorts at the Queen's House, Greenwich.