Project Director and Founder
Grace Ioppolo (G.j.ioppolo@reading.ac.uk) is Professor Emerita, and formerly Professor of Shakespearean and Early Modern Drama in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading. Her publications include Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse (2006) as well as Revising Shakespeare (1991) and Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes (2000). She has produced critical editions of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Measure for Measure and Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent and has published numerous articles on textual transmission and manuscript culture.
With Peter Beal she has co-edited Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (2007), a collection of essays on manuscripts written by, to, or for Queen Elizabeth, and English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, 11: Manuscripts and their Makers in the English Renaissance (2002). She is the General Editor of The Complete Works of Thomas Heywood, 10 volumes (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).
She particularly welcomes students interested in post-graduate study of the Henslowe-Alleyn archive in particular or in early modern theatre history, manuscript study or archival research in general.
Project Photographer
David Cooper graduated from Cambridge University with a PhD in Organic Chemistry and did several years of research before becoming the Librarian of Corpus Christi College in Oxford. During his long tenure there he became interested in the development of modern techniques for the preservation and handling of rare books and manuscripts.
Eventually he was able to combine his professional concerns with his interest in photography and set up and ran a project investigating methods for the production of high-resolution images of fragile books and manuscripts. He was instrumental in the design of specialist equipment for holding delicate books during imaging and the establishment of procedures. At the conclusion of this project he set up Digital Lightforms Ltd, which is dedicated to the production of images of books and manuscripts within archives that do not have their own facilities. He has worked in locations as diverse as St. Paul’s Cathedral and the National Archives of Portugal in Lisbon as well as Dulwich College and has also been a consultant in the setting up of imaging facilities in the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai.
Technical Director
Paul Vetch was a Research Fellow at the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) at King’s College London, where he was involved in development work, project management, technical infrastructure, and the teaching programme. His primary responsibilities and research interests lay in interface and interaction design, web-based annotation, and mechanisms for publishing on the web. He spent several years running his own business designing websites built around Content Management Systems (CMS) and has an advanced degree in medieval English literature.
Paul’s primary responsibility at DDH was in overseeing interface design and addressing usability and accessibility requirements for over 50 web (and DVD/CD) based digital humanities projects. He also managed DDH's considerable server fabric, which provided safe long-term storage of several terabytes of archive quality image and audio data in addition to numerous web-based research outputs. Together with Paul Spence, Paul was responsible for the ongoing development of the xMod XML publishing tool which was used to generate websites for the majority of DDH's web-based research projects, including this one.
Paul has spoken and written extensively on the application of Human-Computer Interface theory and praxis to the particular challenges of the digital humanities. In his research, he has focused on issues of usability and accessibility (both practically and strategically) in Digital Humanities projects, as well as user interaction, and rethinking the concept of the digital edition to provide more meaningful interaction with users, primarily through web-based annotation. He has also worked on modes of web-based interaction, assessing the potential for the application of Web 2.0 technology and methodology, both to the Digital Humanities and to the cultural heritage sector more generally.
KDL Team Members
The project web application was extensively redeveloped and had new material added in late 2019/early 2020 by staff at King's Digital Lab. The move from xMod to a Django-based CMS and the replacement of the old image viewer with an IIIF compliant system was carried out by Brian Maher. User Interface/User Experience specialists Tiffany Ong and Olga Loboda handled the redesign of the front end, and Paul Caton helped with the addition of new materials and corrections to existing content.
Advisory Board Members
Peter Beal, FBA, FSA, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. He is also a consultant to Sotheby’s, where he was formerly a Director and for twenty-five years English Manuscript Expert. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1993 and was J. P. R. Lyell Reader in Bibliography at Oxford, 1995-96. His major publications in the field of early modern manuscripts include Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 1450-1700 (4 volumes, 1980-93), In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth Century England (1998) and A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology 1450-2000 (2008). He was co-founder and co-editor of the annual journal English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700. He built an AHRC-funded database Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 (CELM), which is freely available online.
Julian Bowsher studied Roman archaeology at London University and spent a number of years in the near east working on Roman sites including a 2nd century AD theatre. Since joining the Museum of London Archaeology Service in 1986, where he is now a Senior Archaeologist, he has concentrated on the Tudor and Stuart period, much of it in connection with excavations in Greenwich and with playhouses and theatres in London. In addition to his extensive work in excavating the site of the original Rose Playhouse on London's Southbank, Julian has acted as advisor on the excavations in London’s Shoreditch of the remains of The Theatre (1576), one of the first purpose-built theatres in early modern England. His publications on early modern theatres and audiences include ‘Marlowe and the Rose’, in Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed. J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell (2000); ‘Holywell Priory and The Theatre in Shoreditch, London’, Archaeologist, Vol. 11 (2007); ‘Encounters between actors, audience and archaeologists at the Rose theatre, 1587-1989’, in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory, ed. L. McAtackney, M. Palus, and A. Piccini (2007); and ‘The Rose and its stages’ in Shakespeare Survey, Volume 60 (2007). He has also published extensively on the near east, classical sites, and numismatics. He discusses his excavations at the Rose in his book The Rose and the Globe - playhouses of Shakespeare's Bankside, Southwark: excavations 1988-1991, co-authored with his colleague Pat Miller and published in 2009 by English Heritage and the Museum of London, and in Shakespeare's London Theatreland: Archaeology, History, and Drama, published in 2012 by the Museum of London.
S. P. Cerasano is the Edgar W. B. Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, USA. The author of numerous publications on drama and theatre history, she has edited Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (Routledge) and co-edited three books with Marion Wynne-Davies, including Renaissance Drama by Women (Routledge). She is currently the editor of the annual journal Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. She has been working on the lives and careers of Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn for over twenty years and is currently writing a book tentatively entitled Philip Henslowe: Elizabethan Theatre, the Court Servant, and the Great Diary.
R. A. Foakes was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where he founded the English Department and later served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. One of the world’s leading early modern theatre historians, his 1960 landmark edition, with R. T. Rickert, of Henslowe’s Diary (Cambridge University Press, reprinted in 2002) was followed in 1970 by his photo-facsimile of The Henslowe Papers (Scolar Press). He edited numerous plays by Shakespeare (for Arden, Cambridge, and Penguin, among other presses) and other early modern dramatists, including Tourneur and Fletcher, and in 1960 he prepared the Malone Society Reprints edition of The Telltale from the manuscript at Dulwich College. He was the author of numerous books, including Shakespeare and Violence (2003), Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art (1993), and Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays—From Satire to Celebration (1971), as well as a wide range of scholarly articles. He was also a distinguished scholar of English Romantic writers, most notably S. T. Coleridge, whose Lectures 1808-1819 On Literature he reconstructed and edited in two volumes for Princeton University Press in 1987.
John Lavagnino is Reader in Digital Humanities at King's College London. He studied physics at Harvard University and American literature at Brandeis University, where he wrote his PhD dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov. He has worked in atmospheric science at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and in digital publishing for numerous organizations. He was one of the general editors of the Oxford University Press edition of The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (2007), and is one of the collaborators on the online Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700.
Calista M. Lucy, MCILIP, Keeper of the Archives at Dulwich College, started her working life at the London Library, followed by 13 years as Information Co-ordinator in various parts of the Esso/Exxon operation in the UK. Since 2001 she has worked at Dulwich College (www.dulwich.org.uk). She became Keeper of the Archives in 2006. She co-ordinates loans from the collection, curates exhibitions and writes biographies of Old Alleynians for the College. Her unpublished dissertation is on the influence of Shakespeare's writing on book titles. She introduced the Fortune Contract at the Fortune Theatre Symposium at Shakespeare's Globe in November 2006. For digital photographs of any of the Henslowe-Alleyn papers and for permission to reproduce them, please contact her directly at: archives@dulwich.org.uk
Jan Piggott, MA (Oxon.), Ph.D. (Calif.), FSA, has been associated with Dulwich College since 1972 as Assistant Master in the English Department, as Head of English for ten years, and until 2006 as Keeper of the Archives. He is the author of Turner’s Vignettes (Tate Gallery, 1993), Shackleton, the Antarctic and Endurance (Dulwich College, 2000), Palace of the People: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham 1854-1936 (Hurst, 2004), and he contributed to Wodehouse Goes to School (Porpoise, 1997). He has also written pamphlets on art, architecture and literature. His book Dulwich College: a History, 1616–2008 was published by the College in June 2008. At the College he was the curator of a number of exhibits on such alumni as Ernest Shackleton, the writers P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler, and the film director Michael Powell.
H.R. Woudhuysen is Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. He is one of the General Editors of the third series Arden Shakespeare for which he has edited Love's Labour's Lost and, with Katherine Duncan-Jones, The Narrative Poems. His book Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558-1640 was published in 1996. He worked with Peter Beal and John Lavagnino on the AHRC-funded project, the online Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700. Some of his recent scholarly articles have discussed early modern writing tables, the handwriting of Queen Elizabeth I, the foundations of Shakespeare's text, and the production, distribution, and reception during the twentieth century of British second-hand booksellers’ catalogues. He is also a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. He worked with Michael Suarez, SJ, as co-general editor of The Oxford Companion to the Book, (published in 2010), which covers all aspects of the book from ancient to modern times throughout the world.