Dr Anna Myers is an art historian focusing on British visual and material culture c.1600-1900. She is a specialist in the cultural history of Shakespeare, with recent and forthcoming publications addressing histories of gender, consumption, and intermediality in relation to Shakespeare.
Anna was awarded her PhD, ‘“We are such stuff”: Shakespeare and Material Culture in Eighteenth-Century England’ from the University of Edinburgh in 2024. She is presently working on her first monograph which builds on her PhD research, examining how Shakespearean objects permeated everyday life in the eighteenth century and informed contemporary social identities as the playwright became the English national poet. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships spanning a range of funding bodies including The British Shakespeare Association, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies on British Art, The Lewis Walpole Library (Yale), and Edinburgh College of Art.
Anna is currently a Teaching Fellow in 18th Century Art History at Edinburgh College of Art. She has held several teaching positions and fellowships at the University of Edinburgh and is an Associate Fellow of Advance HE (AFHEA). Her cross-disciplinary research—spanning art history, English literature, theatre studies and environmental humanities—informs her object-led, research-informed teaching.
Research interests:
Anna is particularly interested in how people have 'thought with things’ through material, sensory and embodied experiences. Her interdisciplinary research interests broadly encompass, Shakespeare, adaptation, temporality, histories of belief, cultural history, and ‘the middling sort’.
Her new research project focuses on the material histories of wood and considers wooden objects sourced from, or visually and textually associated with, culturally significant trees in Britain from circa 1650-1850. It analyses how these 'things' could embody memories, mythologies, past events and people, and in doing so informed British identities.