Erica Sheen

I am a specialist in the Renaissance and Cinema with specific knowledge of American and European cinema during the Cold War.

I completed an undergraduate degree in English Literature at Birkbeck College London before undertaking my doctoral research on Shakespeare, alongside pursuing an interest in film at the British Film Institute. I have taught at London, Oxford, Cambridge and Sheffield universities before joining the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York in 2007.

My research, combining Renaissance studies and cinema, stems from my interest in the cultural politics of historical media, and its implications for the way we understand and enjoy media texts. An important feature of my approach is my commitment to exploring the range of critical paradigms dictated by the individual text in its own institutional context.

My work combines literary techniques of close reading; theoretical approaches to concepts of the institution and of the public sphere; production history; the histories of property and intellectual property and biography.

My forthcoming monograph, Cold War Shakespeare, has been supported by research grants from the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin; the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives, NYE; the Getty Research Institute, LA; a British Academy Research Grant and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

Relevant publications

• Shakespeare and the Institution of the Theatre: the Best in this Kind (Palgrave Shakespeare studies 2009)

• Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England (with Lorna Hutson, Palgrave 2004)

• The Cinema of David Lynch (with Annette Davison, Wallflower 2004)

• Cold War Shakespeare (forthcoming)

Professional roles

• Visiting Scholarship at St Johns Oxford

• Visiting Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin

• Research residences at the Tamiment Library NYU, the Truman Presidential Library and the Getty Research Institute

• Research Fellowship at Leverhulme

• Research Fellowship at CAS, LMU Munich