About

Elizabeth E. Tavares, PhD, (she/her) is an interdisciplinary scholar of Medieval and Renaissance literature and performance. She is currently at work on her first book manuscript, The Repertory System Before Shakespeare: Playing the Stock Market, which traces the development of the repertory system and the ways in which it conditioned the 1580s and ’90s English theatre industry to argue that it was repetition, revision, and collaboration, rather than novelty, that produced the diverse, solvent marketplace in which William Shakespeare and his contemporaries would come to train.

Her recent research interests include the role climatological phenomena played in the emergence of the professional playing companies, the place of victualing houses in sixteenth-century new play development, and the effects of content curation on early (modern) habits of mind. Her most recent work explores allusion and representation of Tartary tribes, unified under Chinggis Khan in the early thirteenth century, in sixteenth-century English theatrical documents and travelogues.

Tavares’s scholarship and reviews have appeared in or are forthcoming from Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Notes & Queries, Shakespeare, Scene, The Journal of Dramatic Theory & Criticism, and The Map of Early Modern London, among others. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants, including from the NEH, Mellon Foundation, Early Modern Conversions, Folger Library, Huntington Library, Newberry Library, and Society for Theatre Research. This research has been recognized with prizes from the Medieval & Renaissance Drama Society and Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.

For more, visit her website, blog, or follow Tavares on Twitter (@ElizETavares).