Rate My Professor Barbara Ravelhofer

Barbara Ravelhofer is Professor in English Literature in the Department of English Studies at Durham University and a Research Associate of the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge. She obtained a degree in English and German Literature from the University of Munich, followed by a PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge. She was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge from 1997 to 2001, and held visiting fellowships at the Universities of Bologna as Senior Visiting Fellow in 2001-2002, Princeton University in 2002-2003, and Harvard University. Her career includes appointments advancing to her current professorship at Durham, where she is a member of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies and directs the History of Performance strand. Prof. Ravelhofer welcomes PhD students interested in early modern English literature and comparative literature, as well as medieval and Renaissance dance, costume, and drama.

Prof. Ravelhofer’s research centres on English Literature and Renaissance Studies, with particular emphasis on European spectacle from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, editing and book history in comparative perspective, and oral forms of literature. Her monograph The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford University Press, 2006) analyses illusionistic theatre of the Renaissance, professional ballet, theatre management, and dramatic performance at the early Stuart court, utilising extensive documentary evidence from productions in England, France, Italy, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire. She edited the French dance treatise Louange de la danse (2000), James Shirley and Early Modern Theatre: New Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2016), and co-edited English Historical Drama, 1500-1660: Forms Outside the Canon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Key articles include “Shakespeare and Dance” (Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 2021), “Censorship and Poetry at the Court of Charles I: The Case of Georg Rodolf Weckherlin” (English Literary Renaissance, 2013), and “Burlesque Ballet, a Ballad and a Banquet in Ben Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphos’d (1621)” (Dance Research, 2007). She leads the AHRC-funded James Shirley Project as Principal Investigator and contributes to Records of Early English Drama: The North-East. Her current book project examines English court theatre, iconoclasm, and the dawn of the Civil War.