Emma Depledge (BA, MA Leicester, PhD Geneva) specialises in seventeenth and eighteenth-century literature. Her research interests include William Shakespeare, John Milton, authorship studies, book history, royalist writing, theatre history and mock-heroic poetry.

Emma’s first book, Shakespeare’s Rise to Cultural Prominence: Print, Politics and Alteration, 1642-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018; paperback 2022), argued that the Exclusion Crisis of 1678-82 ought to be seen as the watershed moment in Shakespeare’s authorial afterlife. She is also co-editor of Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade, 1640-1740 (with Peter Kirwan, Cambridge University Press, 2017; paperback 2022), the first comprehensive study of Shakespeare’s print history, 1640-1740; and co-editor of a collection entitled Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlives (with John Garrison and Marissa Nicosia, Oxford University Press, 2021).

She also co-edited a special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly (with Rachel Willie), entitled ‘Performance and the Paper Stage, 1642-1695’ (2022), and a volume for SPELL entitled Medieval and Early Modern Afterlives (2024): https://spell.winter-verlag.de/issue/SPELL/2023/43

She is currently working on a monograph that explores the relationship between mock-heroic poetry and the London book trade, 1660-1740.

Emma taught at the universities of Geneva and Fribourg before joining the University of Neuchâtel in 2018. She has conducted research at The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA; The Huntington Library, San Marino; The Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library and Beinecke Library; and The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.

For the year 2020-21 she was awarded a two-month W. M. Keck Foundation Fellowship to work at the Huntington Library, San Marino, and a one-month fellowship to work at the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas, supported by the Carl H. Pforzheimer Endowment. She will conduct research for a project entitled 'Bibliographical Puzzles: A Descriptive Bibliography of Quarto Editions of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar'.

Emma is on the Comité Scientifique of the CUSO programme doctoral de langue et littérature anglaises and frequently organises workshops and training for doctoral students. 

• CUSO - Doctoral Programm in English Language and Literature

She is President of the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies (SAMEMES).

She is also associate editor for the journal English Studies, and she writes the annual review of Editions and Textual Studies for Shakespeare Survey. 

Civility, Cultural Exchange, and Conduct Literature in Early Modern England, 1500-1800

• Fonds national suisse

Monographs 

Shakespeare’s Rise to Cultural Prominence: Print, Politics and Alteration, 1642-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Edited Collections

Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade, 1640-1740 (ed. with Peter Kirwan, Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlife (ed. with John Garrison and Marissa Nicosia, Oxford University Press, 2021).

Performance and the Paper Stage, 1640-1700: Special Issue of Huntington Library Quarterly (ed. With Rachel Willie, 2022).

Medieval and Early Modern Afterlives: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 43 (2023).

 Articles & Book Chapters

Depledge,Emma. ‘Poetry, Publishers, and Print: Humphrey Moseley, Henry Herringman, and Jacob Tonson’, in Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 5, Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, ed. Laura L. Knoppers (OUP, 2024). DOI: 10.1093/9780198852803.003.0007

Depledge, Emma. ‘The Year’s Contributions to Shakespeare Studies: Editions and Textual Studies’. Shakespeare Survey 77. Ed Emma Smith (2024), Forthcoming. 

Depledge, Emma ‘Introduction’ (with Katrin Rupp), Medieval and Early Modern Afterlives: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 43 (2023).

Depledge, Emma. ‘The Year’s Contributions to Shakespeare Studies: Editions and Textual Studies’. Shakespeare Survey 76: Digital and Virtual. Ed Emma Smith (2023): 251-62.  

Depledge, Emma. ‘The Year’s Contributions to Shakespeare Studies: Editions and Textual Studies’. Shakespeare Survey 75: Othello. Ed Emma Smith (2022): 384-98. 

Depledge, Emma. ‘Introduction’ (with Rachel Willie), Huntington Library Quarterly 85: Performance and The Paper Stage, 1642-1695, eds. Depledge and Rachel Willie (2022), 1-10.

Depledge, Emma. ‘The Year’s Contributions to Shakespeare Studies: Editions and Textual Studies’. Shakespeare Survey 74: Shakespeare and Education. Ed Emma Smith (2021): 412-26. 

Depledge, Emma. ‘Resources’. The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies. Ed. Lukas Erne. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. 354-66.

Depledge, Emma. ‘Paper/Ink’. Shakespeare / Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies. Ed. Claire M.L. Bourne. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. 383-401.

Depledge, Emma. ‘Battles of Words and Books: Mock-Heroic Poems and The Book Trade, 1660-1740’. Words, Books, Images, and the Long Eighteenth Century: Essays for Allen Reddick. Eds. Antoinina Bevan Zlatar, Mark Ittensohn, Enit Steiner-Karafili, Olga Timofeeva. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2021. 103-120.

Depledge, Emma. ‘(Re)Packaging Milton for the Late-Seventeenth-Century Book Trade: Jacob Tonson, Paradise Lost and John Dryden’s The State of Innocence’. Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlives. Eds. Emma Depledge, John Garrison and Marissa Nicosia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 42-52.

Depledge, Emma, John Garrison and Marissa Nicosia. ‘What Made Milton?’. Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlives. Eds. Emma Depledge, John Garrison and Marissa Nicosia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 1-16.

‘False Dating: The Case of the “1676” Hamlet Quartos’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 112: 2 (June 2018), 183-199.

‘Introduction’ (with Peter Kirwan), in Canonising Shakespeare, eds. Depledge and Kirwan (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1-14.

‘Shakespeare for Sale, 1640-1740’, in Canonising Shakespeare, eds. Depledge and Kirwan (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 17-25.

‘Editing Shakespeare, 1640-1700’ (with Peter Kirwan), in Canonising Shakespeare, eds. Depledge and Kirwan (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 145-52.

‘The Politics of Rape in Shakespeare Alterations of the Exclusion Crisis: Nahum Tate’s The History of King Lear, 1681’, in       Renaissance Shakespeare: Shakespeare Renaissances, Proceedings of the 9th World Shakespeare         Conference, ed. by Michael Dobson, Andreas Höfele, Martin Procházka, and Hanna Scolnicov (Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, 2014),    317-24.

‘Playbills, Prologues and Title Pages: Selling Shakespeare Adaptations of the Exclusion Crisis, 1678-1682’, Philological Quarterly 91 (2012), 305-30.

‘Authorship and Alteration: Shakespeare on the Exclusion Crisis Stage and Page, 1678-1682’, in Medieval and Early Modern Authorship, ed. by Lukas Erne and Guillemette Bolens (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature) 25 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2011), 199-213.