Dr Toria Johnson

• BA in Philosophy and French Literature, Colgate University  (2006)
• MA in English Literature, Washington State University (2009)
• PhD in English, University of St Andrews (2013)

I came to Birmingham in 2016, and was previously a Teaching Fellow in Renaissance Literature at the University of St Andrews.

In 2017-2018, I teach on the following undergraduate modules: Shakespeare’s Sisters (co-convenor); Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies (convenor); Songs and Sonnets; and Shakespeare (Jacobean). I contribute lectures to all of these modules, as well as Plays and Performance. 

My areas of expertise include drama, early modern culture, the history of emotions, the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and Shakespeare's cultural heritage. My monograph, Pity and Identity in the Age of Shakespeare (D.S. Brewer, 2021) interrogates the impact of the Reformation on early modern English emotional culture, with a specific focus on the role of pity and compassion in defining English understandings of subjectivity and ‘social’ emotion. I have contributed essays to Compassion in Early Modern Europe 1500-1700 (2021), and Shakespeare and Emotion (2020). In 2018 I was the co-editor (with Rachel E. Holmes, UCL) of a Special Issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies entitled ‘In Pursuit of Truth: Law and Emotion in Early Modern Europe’. 

My current project, Birnam's Oak // Scotland's Shakespeare is a collaborative community-based project working to reimagine the scope and scale of Shakespeare heritage in Scotland, focusing presently on Perthshire's Birnam Oak - the oldest living tree of the Birnam Wood featured in Macbeth. 

In 2017, I was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence in the History of Emotions 1100-1800 (University of Adelaide node).

I co-convene the Postgraduate Doctoral Seminar for PhD students in EDACS at Birmingham, sit on the Extenuating Circumstances panel (EDACS), and I am the EDACS representative on the Bank of Educational Excellence project. I also co-organise the Stratford Residential.