Dr Lucy Clarke (she/they)

I am an interdisciplinary historian of early modern England. I am specifically interested in the processes and experiences of state formation and quotidian encounters with the law, and how political ideas ramified in three dimensions, as bodies moving in space as much as words. 

My DPhil thesis, completed at Jesus College, Oxford, took a new approach to the early modern state,  by considering the state as an inherently performed concept. The thesis examined the presentation of the state in early modern drama in performance, investigating how a selection of plays performed in the outdoor theatres of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean London manifested their own versions of the state. This work, which I am now revising for publication as a monograph, argues that the state was a concept easily apprehensible by ordinary Londoners, without the term ‘state’ ever needing to be used. The drama, therefore, was not simply talking about political discourse: it was political discourse. As such, understanding and criticism of the state was not limited to the upper echelons of society.

My current research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, develops upon my doctoral work. It seeks to write the first history of state formation as a performative process, examining how magistrates in the period 1558-1641 enacted authority. This work draws its primary source base from the records of the Court of Star Chamber, the prime venue for those accused of disobeying, disrespecting or otherwise shaming authority. I am interested in how magisterial authority was practised in every-day encounters between magistrates and those they attempted to govern, and thus how the state came into being in these quotidian interactions. My methodology is multimodal, beginning with detailed archival research into specific types of magisterial performance – arrests, crowd calming, intervention in fights – in an attempt to reconstruct both the way that such performances took place, and how they were received. The fictive strategies of Star Chamber bills, cross-referenced with contemporary jurisprudential texts, allow me to build up a picture of the expectations and concerns of both litigants and the Court itself. I then turn to practice-as-research, asking actors to stage selected incidents from the Star Chamber records that I have turned into scripts. These workshops provide invaluable insights into how magistrates enacted authority, and reveal problems with the enactment of the state that are otherwise absent from the historical record. By using PAR, I’m able to engage with the state as it came into being: as embodied action that was interpreted by those present. This aspect of my work is also vital for thinking about how secure state authority actually was: by thinking about the state as performed, then, I’m able to challenge the overly pacified model of English state formation. 

I joined the Department in October 2023 as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow. Before coming to Sheffield, I was Teaching Fellow in History and Literature at the University of Warwick (2022-3), Lecturer in English (including Theatre) at Wroxton College, Fairleigh Dickinson University (2021-2), and Tutor in History and English at various Oxford colleges (2019-2022). During my DPhil, I held a Jesus College Graduate Scholarship (2018-20) and a Scouloudi Doctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, London (2020-21). I was also a Short-Term Fellow at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California in July 2022.