MEMOs is delighted to announce that our forthcoming edited collection, Materialising the East in Early Modern English Drama, edited by MEMOs members Aisha Hussain and Dr. Murat Öğütcü is to be published by Arden Bloomsbury as part of their Arden Studies in Early Modern Drama series, edited by Lisa Hopkins and Douglas Bruster.

This collection will feature chapters from members of the MEMOs team as well as scholars from our broader research community. The volume will make a significant contribution to existing scholarship on early modern English dramatic representations of the East, and the Muslim world in particular, by taking as its focus the material dimensions of early modern performances. The editors summarise such interventions as follows:

Despite the popularity of plays about the East, the representation of the East in early modern drama has been either overlooked, marginalised as footnotes, or generalised into taken-for-granted stereotypes. Thus, there is a need to focus on the multi-layered, often conflicting and changing perceptions of the East and how dramatic works made use of their respective theatrical space to represent the concept of the East in drama. Accordingly, this volume aims to re-examine the (mis)representation of the East in the Early Modern English outdoor and indoor stages to broaden our understanding of early modern theatrical productions beyond Shakespeare and beyond the European continent. For this purpose, the chapters of this volume will analyse how the material aspects of stage architecture, costumes, and effect of performance affect the conceptualisation of the East on the early modern English outdoor and indoor stages. The chapters of this volume will emphasise these material aspects of dramatic performances and will deal with non-Shakespearean plays from the Elizabethan, Jacobean, Caroline, and Restoration periods.

Congratulations to MEMOs members Aisha Hussain and Dr. Murat Öğütcü for their excellent work, and for securing their publication contract with Arden Bloomsbury! We can’t wait to read this exciting new volume!