Dr Laura Seymour

laura seymour
Stipendiary Lecturer
St Anne's

Laura's research focuses on neurodiversity in early modern writing. Her work centres neurodivergent readings and perspectives, and focuses strongly on themes of neurodivergent flourishing and on developing neurodivergent critical praxes. She is working on her third book, Early Modern Neurodiversity: a study of neurodivergence in early modern Europe, across languages and cultures focusing on various authors including Lope de Vega, Ben Jonson, legal texts from England and Scotland, Jan Kochanowski, and the Christus Patiens dramatic genre.

Her current project, 'New Understandings of Hamlet', (2022-23) is supported by a British Academy Small Research Grant. This project centres lived experience of neurodivergence and suicidal ideation in reading William Shakespeare's "Hamlet".

Her previous work on neurodiversity was supported by Oxford's John Fell Fund and English Faculty Covid Recovery Fund.

Her forthcoming book, Shakespeare and Neurodiversity (Cambridge University Press, 2024) is about teaching Shakespeare in an inclusive way.

She is PI of 'Neurodiversity at Oxford'; this project, run with Dr Siân Grønlie and enabled by a grant from the Oxford Diversity Fund, provides a range of support, social activities, and information for Oxford's neurodiverse community starting in the 2021-2022 academic year.

Her previous research resulted in a monograph, Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), examining people who did not conform to social norms in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century English and Spanish literature. This book focuses on Quaker life writing, shrew, witch, and devil plays, the picaresque, and rogue literature.

Her recent publications examine ecocritical approaches to devils in early modern plays, pedagogical theory, hell in Marlowe, Milton, and Dekker's works, radical religion and neurodiversity, and autism and metaphor. She has also published several articles and book chapters on Shakespeare and cognition, and Marvell's queer poetry. 

I try and travel sustainably. That includes not flying to conferences, wherever possible. 

Neurodiversity studies, disability studies, early modern literature and cognition, early modern radical women's writing, early modern drama and theatre, radical religion, neurodiversity and pedagogy, English and Spanish comparative literature, neolatin drama.

 Laura currently teaches Shakespeare, Literature in English 1550-1660, and Tragedy. 

In past roles, she has taught, and supervised dissertations for, a variety of topics at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, including European Theatre and Drama, Tragedy, Medieval and Renaissance Literatures, Romance, literature of early modern London, and The Novel. Prior to working at Oxford, Laura lectured at Birkbeck, University of London, Royal Holloway, and Bath Spa University.

Laura is a Fellow of the HEA.

Laura is not securely employed and thus is unable to take on doctoral students. 

 

 

Publications