Old Books, New Worlds: Early Modern English Printed Drama in Australia and New Zealand

The proposed research project has a two-pronged aim. Firstly, it examines copies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playbooks held in Australian and New Zealand libraries in order to bring a transnational framing to the reception history of the culturally influential literary genre of early modern English drama. Secondly, it examines how data relating to these copies can be presented to the international scientific community in a way that foregrounds these copies’ specific geographic and political contexts, in line with approaches to the decolonisation of knowledge that reflect the books’ Southern Hemisphere settler colonial locations. Scholars in the field of book history are beginning to confront this field’s reliance on material artefacts (i.e. rare books) that were acquired and preserved with the aid of wealth obtained in problematic circumstances, but thus far the focus of such confrontations has been Northern Hemisphere copies and collections. In creating outputs focused instead on data drawn from inspections of Southern Hemisphere collections of rare books, and in developing an online resource that provides an international model for how to acknowledge problematic acquisition histories in culturally sensitive ways, “Old Books, New Worlds: Early Modern English Printed Drama in Australia and New Zealand” offers a significant and transformative intervention in the field of book history. It is relevant both to the 2023-2024 Work Programme to produce “Innovative research on the European cultural heritage and the cultural and creative industries – building our future from our past” and also to the 2023-2024 Work Programme to facilitate “A human-centred and ethical development of digital technologies”.