Professor Laurie Maguire
Professor of English Language and Literature; Tutorial Fellow, Magdalen College
I am currently working on an interdisciplinary collaborative project with two Oxford colleagues: Felix Budelmann in Classics, and Robin Dunbar in Evolutionary Psychology. We are using Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama to test a range of theories about audience response, from how audiences fill in gaps in order to create ‘character’ to how dramatists’ understanding of audiences’ mind-reading capacities influence how they structure plot or create ambiguity.
I have recently coupled a long-standing interest in the theatricality of early modern medicine with an equally long-standing interest in Shakespearean selfhood to look at two kinds of interiority: one which yields its secrets to surgeons’ anatomical dissection and one which does not.
To undergraduates at Magdalen I teach Shakespeare and the Renaissance, and individual authors and topics from 1550 onwards. To English and Classics students I teach Shakespeare, Renaissance, Tragedy; Comedy; Satire. I lecture on Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the English Faculty and teach graduate courses to Masters of Studies students.
In Oxford I co-convene a fortnightly interdisciplinary seminar on ’Literature and Medicine’ at Green Templeton College. I am a Trustee of Shakespeare’s Globe and a member of the Selection Panel for Medical Humanities at the Wellcome Trust.
Publications
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This Is Shakespeare
May 2019|Journal articleThe Shakespeare in this book poses awkward questions rather than offering bland answers, always implicating us in working out what it might mean. This is Shakespeare. And he needs your attention.Drama -
Cognition, Endorphins, and the Literary Response to Tragedy
September 2017|Journal article|The Cambridge Quarterly -
A Christmas renaissance
December 2016|Journal article|BMJ -
Emotional arousal when watching drama increases pain threshold and social bonding.
September 2016|Journal article|Royal Society open scienceFiction, whether in the form of storytelling or plays, has a particular attraction for us: we repeatedly return to it and are willing to invest money and time in doing so. Why this is so is an evolutionary enigma that has been surprisingly underexplored. We hypothesize that emotionally arousing drama, in particular, triggers the same neurobiological mechanism (the endorphin system, reflected in increased pain thresholds) that underpins anthropoid primate and human social bonding. We show that, compared to subjects who watch an emotionally neutral film, subjects who watch an emotionally arousing film have increased pain thresholds and an increased sense of group bonding.
