Charlotte Potter

research interests

I am joining the department this Autumn (2023) as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate on the Shakespeare’s Lyric Poetry project, led by Prof Lukas Erne and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

I completed my AHRC-funded PhD in English Literature at the University of Sussex in 2022, with a thesis entitled ‘Unfixed Virginity: Metaphor and Defloration in Early Modern Drama’. I also hold an MPhil in Renaissance Literature from Newnham College, Cambridge (2017), and an MA in English Literature from the University of St Andrews (2015). My thesis explored the relationship between metaphor and virginity in early modern culture, with a focus on Shakespearean drama. It argued that virginity was an inherently destabilizing and imaginative concept, and that writers, especially playwrights, capitalise on this instability in their plays. I develop an account of virginity as ‘unfixed’ by examining puzzling and paradoxical examples from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V, as well as Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling. My approach of ‘unfixed virginity’ reflects how virginity was circulating at a broad imaginative level across culture, a metaphorical concept produced within a patriarchal social context. I am currently developing the thesis into a monograph, and look forward to teaching an MA seminar in Spring 2024 based on this research. My current research builds on my doctoral work to take my theory of ‘unfixed virginity’ beyond analysis of female virginity in Shakespeare’s plays to early modern poetry more broadly.