Research Team

Marta Cerezo (PI)

Marta Cerezo is Lecturer of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at the UNED where she teaches BA and MA courses. She held a BA in English (1995), completed her bachelor’s degree dissertation in 1998 and, as FPU grantee, finished her thesis on the critical reconsideration of Titus Andronicus in June 2001. Her current main research area is the study of Shakespeare at the Vatican and the Shakespeare Sermons delivered since 1810 in Holy Trinity Church (Stratford-upon-Avon). She was granted a fellowship by the Trinity College Council to carry out research stays at the University of Cambridge on these sermons (2016 and 2018). Her main essays and articles on Shakespeare’s religious afterlives are published in English Studies (2023), E-Rea (2022), Religion & Literature (2022), Shakespeare (2021), International Journal of English Studies (2020) and Celebrating Shakespeare (2015). She has also authored Critical Approaches to Shakespeare (1623-2000). Shakespeare for All Time (UNED, 2022) and co-authored, with Dr. Ángeles de la Concha, Ejes de la literatura inglesa medieval y renacentista (UNED, 2011). She has coordinated the Master’s Degree on English Literature and Culture and Their Social Impact (UNED) since 2015 and is the Principal Investigator of the UNED research group English Literary Studies in Society (ELSSO), which she constituted in 2020. She is a member of the international network ReSBri (Religion and Society in Britain) based at Clermont Auvergne University. She is Sederi Yearbook editor.

Antonio Ballesteros

Antonio Ballesteros is Full Professor of English at the UNED. He has devoted a significant part of his wide-ranging research to the study and analysis of Shakespeare’s works. He has edited Shakespearean plays (Richard III, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor,King Lear, Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, Edward III) in prestigious Spanish publishing houses such as Edaf and Octaedro. His most important contribution in this respect is the edition and translation of Edward III into Spanish, which was awarded the “María Martínez Sierra Prize” for drama translation by the Asociación Española de Directores de Escena (ADE). He has also published fourteen book chapters and articles on diverse aspects of Shakespearean drama and performance (monstrosity and politics being two recurrent topics), some of them in journals such as Atlantis, Sederi, ADE Teatro Quarto-Textes, Discours et Représentations 1600-1800. As a university lecturer and professor, he has been teaching Shakespeare’s works at graduate level for more than thirty years. Ballesteros has recently opened a new research line on Hinduism and literature which will be a starting point for his research on the religious, spiritual, and ritual features of Shakespeare’s plays in the dramatic context of the Indian subcontinent, taking into consideration Hindu and Buddhist elements in specific theatrical performances.

Jonathan P. A. Sell

Jonathan P. A. Sell is Full Professor of English at the University of Alcalá. He has published numerous articles on early modern English drama, particularly Shakespeare, in national and international specialised journals, as well as four monographs on early modern literature, three of them on Shakespeare. The relevance to this project proposal of those articles and monographs is their shared concern to examine how Shakespeare’s works interact with intellectual currents and traditions of thought that extend both backwards and forwards from the plays. Sell’s familiarity with the critical reception of Shakespeare’s works from the Restoration to Romanticism and the way that reception was informed by classical, humanist and enlightenment philosophy is attested to by his chapters “The Fairy Way of Writing,” “Divine Mechanisms: Sublime Form and Shape” and “Bastard Art, Innocent Experience” in Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos (Routledge, 2021), and “The Sympathetic Imagination” and “The Mutualist’s Dividend” in Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos (Routledge, 2021). Sell’s knowledge of the works of Shakespeare and of the reception history of the author in its philosophical aspect will be essential for his analysis in the frame of this project of the impact of late seventeenth and eighteenth-century religious controversy on Shakespeare criticism within the period. Much of that controversy is inseparable from key issues in enlightenment epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion.

Luis J. Conejero

Luis J. Conejero is Associate Professor of English at the University of Extremadura. His main area of research focuses on William Shakespeare. His doctoral dissertation explored the ways in which biblical discourse is used in Shakespeare’s historical dramas, and how these instances have been translated into Spanish. This led to his ongoing research into how Shakespeare’s work has been transposed in Spain, paying particular attention to the religious intertext which permeates the Elizabethan dramatist’s plays. His book chapters and articles have been published in prestigious journals, like Sederi, and important publishers in Europe (Comares, Peter Lang, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Gunter Narr Verlag, and Lit Verlag). His published work on Shakespeare and biblical intertextuality includes “Biblical Types and Archetypes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). He has presented papers on Shakespeare and biblical intertextuality at the World Shakespeare Congress (WSC, London and Stratford, 2016) and at the European Shakespeare Research Association (ESRA, Gdansk, 2017; Rome, 2019; and Athens, 2021). He has also shared his research on political theology and Anglo-Spanish relations in the works of Shakespeare at the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA, Los Angeles, California, 2018) and at SEDERI 2019 International Conference in Lisbon. Conejero is one of the most qualified Spanish Shakespearean scholars to address within the framework of this project the cultural substratum underlying the translatability of biblical intertextuality of Shakespeare’s works into Spanish.

Isabel Guerrero

Isabel Guerrero is Associate Professor of English at the UNED. Her research focuses on Shakespeare in contemporary performance. She has published several articles and book chapters on Shakespeare’s presence at theatre festivals of different status, from official to fringe festivals, discussing how different performance contexts influence the production, reception, and performance of the plays. Her publications are in specialised journals such as Cahiers Élisabéthains, SEDERI, Atlantis and Signa, among others, or publishing houses such as John Benjamin, Bloomsbury, and Routledge. She is particularly interested in how the context of performance influences the reception of the same production. She also works on the connection between Shakespearean productions and reality in the 21st century, focusing on contemporary productions in which elements from real life enter the stage and question traditional ideas of mimesis in the theatre. Guerrero is a founding member of the First International Conference for Young Researchers on Theatre Studies (CIJIET, Universidad de Murcia). She holds a degree in Stage Directing from the Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático (Murcia, Spain) and combines her research activity with theatre practice. Her expertise on Shakespeare performance contexts makes her an apt researcher to analyse an unexplored area of study such as the performance contexts and the ideological and cultural dimensions of contemporary Shakespeare performances in religious settings.