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.