Emma Depledge (BA, MA Leicester, PhD Geneva) specialises in seventeenth and eighteenth-century British 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), argues 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 has also co-edited a special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly (with Rachel Willie), entitled ‘Performance and the Paper Stage, 1642-1695’ (2022).

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 (http://english.cuso.ch) and frequently organises workshops and training for doctoral students. 

She is Vice-President of the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies (SAMEMES) https://www.unil.ch/samemes/home.html

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

https://twitter.com/EmmaDepledge1

Research and publications

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).

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. ‘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.