Dr Hester Lees-Jeffries

I came to Cambridge as a Commonwealth Scholar from New Zealand in 1999 to begin my PhD and have been here ever since. I work on early modern literature, especially Shakespeare, with particular interests in performance and visual and material culture (costume, textiles, jewellery, gardens, portraits, miniatures). I was a Research Fellow at Magdalene College from 2003-6, and I've been a Fellow of St Catharine's since 2006. I really enjoy working with our students as they discover more about Renaissance literature. Unsurprisingly, I love going to the theatre.

Textile Shakespeare (in progress)
Romeo and Juliet (introduction for the New Cambridge Shakespeare) (in progress)
Shakespeare's Histories: a very short introduction (in progress)

Shakespeare and Memory (Oxford, 2013)
England's Helicon: fountains in early modern literature and culture (Oxford, 2007)
(as editor), Anne Barton, The Shakespearean Forest (Cambridge, 2017)

Numerous essays and articles, most recently:
'Mantled in blood: Shakespeare's bloodstains and early modern textile culture', in Blood Matters, ed. Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp (Philadelphia, 2018)
'My mother's maids, when they did sew and spin: staging sewing, telling tales', Shakespeare Survey 70 (2017)

For a full list of articles and essays about early modern literature, please see Dr Lees-Jeffries' Faculty profile.