News

NVS Seminar: Dr. Whitney Sperrazza book launch, 11 September 2025

The NVS is delighted to be co-hosting a book launch for Dr. Whitney Sperrazza's Anatomical Forms: The Science of the Body in Early Modern Women's Poetry (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). Dr. Sperrazza is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M and will be in conversation with two other English Department colleagues, Dr. Kevin O'Sullivan and Dr. Katie Adkison. 

This NVS Seminar will take place at 12:30 Central Time in LAAH 453 at Texas A&M University and will also be streamed live on Zoom using the link below:

https://tamu.zoom.us/j/93140643094?pwd=KxSIiDb3SddO1982qiD2e6yxJMPpzb.1

(Zoom passcode, if needed: 895771)

We very much hope to see you there. Please direct any questions about the event to rstagg@tamu.edu

New Variorum Shakespeare announces event schedule for Fall Semester 2025

The New Variorum Shakespeare has announced its schedule of events for the forthcoming Fall Semester.

Our program begins in September with a book launch of Dr. Whitney Sperrazza's Anatomical Forms: The Science of the Body in Early Modern Women's Poetry (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). Dr. Sperrazza is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M. For this in-person event, which will also be streamed live on Zoom, Dr. Sperrazza will be in conversation with two other Texas A&M English Department colleagues, Dr. Kevin O'Sullivan and Dr. Katie Adkison. A catered reception will follow.

In October the NVS will be hosting a tea reception at the Shakespeare Society of Japan conference in Tokyo. Our Director Dr. Robert Stagg, who will also be giving a plenary lecture at the conference, will talk to delegates about the New Variorum Shakespeare and how it might be incorporated into their research and teaching.

In November our NVS Seminars resume with a talk by one of our General Editors, Prof. Eric Rasmussen (Foundation Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno). Prof. Rasmussen is one of the world's leading Shakespeareans: as well as being a widely-published expert on the Shakespeare First Folio, he is the co-editor of the RSC's Complete Works of William Shakespeare and The Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama. This in-person event will also be streamed live on Zoom.

Our term card concludes in December with an exhibition at Texas A&M's Cushing Library about 'Shakespeare and his Europe', which will situate the library's nationally significant collection of Shakespearan texts alongside early modern European books (including its world-class collection of Cervantes and early modern Spanish drama). Faculty members and graduate students at Texas A&M will be treated to a 'private view' of the exhibition followed by a drinks reception in celebration of the NVS and the end of the Fall Semester.

More details of dates, times, etc, will be forthcoming. We hope to see you at many events in our Fall program.

NVS TEI to be preserved by Texas A&M University

Thanks to the efforts of our NVS Board Member and Texas A&M professor Laura Mandell, the TEI for the New Variorum Shakespeare will now be preserved by the Texas A&M College of Arts and Sciences. This arrangement will enable 10TB of permanent, open-access data storage to be used for the NVS, alongside other digital humanities projects, preserving the work of our editors in a form that will be available to all users regardless of any software or databases that might become obsolete. We are grateful to Prof. Mandell and the College of Arts and Sciences for ensuring that the NVS will remain legible and usable for decades to come.

NVS welcomes three undergraduate student assistants for Fall Semester 2025

The New Variorum Shakespeare is very happy to have received support for three undergraduate assistants to join the project in Fall 2025. Thanks to the Texas A&M Undergraduate Professional and Research Experience Program and the Texas A&M English Department's Undergraduate Office, we will be welcoming Adrian Wolinski, Andrew Molina and Jennifer Jacobson to work on the NVS in the Fall Semester 2025. Our graduate student assistant Lindsey Jones continues to work with us over the coming months. As our new undergraduate students arrive, we thank our outgoing undergraduate assistants Alexandra Blue and Grace Hoelscher and our outgoing graduate assistant Inhoo Kim.

Dr. Kris May wins David C. Greetham Prize

NVS Associate Digital Editor Dr. Kris May is co-winner of the David C. Greetham Prize 2023-4, awarded by the Society for Textual Scholarship. Dr. May was awarded the prize alongside two former Texas A&M professors Laura Estill and Heidi Craig (the latter of whom serves on the NVS Board) for their article 'A Rationale of Trans-inclusive Bibliography' published in 'Textual Cultures' (16.2, 2023). The Greetham Prize honors the authors of the best article published in the Society for Textual Scholarship's journal during a two-year cycle. Everyone at the NVS congratulates Dr. May on this prestigious award.

NVS celebrates Prof. Paul Werstine at retirement conference

The New Variorum Shakespeare saluted our General Editor Prof. Paul Werstine at a conference to mark his retirement from King's University College and Western University (London, Canada) in early May 2025. We are happy (and relieved) to note that Prof. Werstine is not yet retiring from his position at the NVS, which he has held for nearly thirty years. The conference, titled 'Editing Shakespeare Now', was concerned with the most urgent questions of editorial practice facing Shakespearean scholars at present, and allowed leading scholars from around the world to thank Prof. Werstine for his contributions to the field. More details of the conference can be found here: https://www.uwo.ca/english/conferences/shakespeare_after_werstine_editing_shakespeare_now/index.html

Our Director Dr. Robert Stagg and Project Manager Dr. Katayoun Torabi attended the conference and gave a short demonstration of the NVS in which they were able to express their appreciation for all Prof. Werstine has done for the variorum over many decades. A recording of their demonstration can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pured6Ayu6E

The NVS team at Texas A&M wishes to convey our thanks to Prof. Werstine for three decades of outstanding and dedicated service to the variorum, and our pleasure at the prospect of continuing to work with him in the years to come.

NVS developer and technical editor Dr. Bryan Tarpley wins DH Award

Many congratulations to NVS developer and technical editor Dr. Bryan Tarpley, whose digital humanities tool Corpora (on which the NVS depends) has won the 2024 award for 'Best DH Tool' at the Digital Humanities Awards.

You can read more about the award here: http://dhawards.org/dhawards2024/results/

And you can read more about Corpora here: https://bptarpley.github.io/corpora/

Dr. Tarpley is Associate Research Scientist at Texas A&M's Center of Digital Humanities Research. His work in the digital humanities involves building data management tools that cater to humanities research. He holds a BA in Computer Science and a PhD in English, where his scholarship focuses on affect theory in contemporary literature. Everyone at the NVS is very grateful to Dr. Tarpley for his outstanding work on the project.