Biography

Email: janice.valls-russell[at]univ-montp3.fr

Janice Valls-Russell is Project Coordinator of A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology and Early English Mythological Texts Series, both hosted on this website. Janice is a Principal Research Associate, employed by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-classical Age and the Enlightenment (IRCL), Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier. She holds a doctorate on Pyramus and Thisbe in English Literature (from Chaucer to Cowley) from Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier.

As Reviews Editor of Cahiers Élisabéthains, Janice has co-edited (with Peter J. Smith and Kath Bradley) Cahiers Élisabéthains, Complete Works Special Issue (2007), and (with Peter J. Smith and Paul Prescott) Cahiers Élisabéthains, 40th Anniversary Special Issue, “Nothing if not critical”: International Perspectives on Shakespearean Theatre Reviewing (2012). She is co-editor of the online bilingual theatre journal, Arrêt sur Scène/Scene Focus.

Recent publications include Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, co-edited with Charlotte Coffin and Agnès Lafont (see select bibliography below). Forthcoming from Manchester University Press: Thomas Heywood and The Classical Tradition (co-ed. with Tania Demetriou)

More here. 

Contributions to this website

• Annotated edition of Thomas Heywood, Troia Britanica (1609), Canto II.  2014. (2009-19), ed. Yves Peyré.

• Review of Katherine Heavey. The Early Modern Medea: Medea in English Literature, 1558–1688. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

 

Select bibliography related to the early modern reception of classical mythology

• “New Directions: ‘The moon shines bright’: Re-viewing the Belmont mythological tapestry in Act 5 of The Merchant of Venice”. The Merchant of Venice: A Critical Reader, ed. Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin. London, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 125–44 (notes pp. 257–63);

• “‘Even Seneca hymselfe to speke in englysh’: John Studley’s Hippolytus and Agamemnon”, Translation and Literature 29, 2020: 25–43. Doi: 10.3366/tal.2020.0407.

• “Ravishing the bride from the classical page to the early modern stage: Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece”. In Scènes de lit/Bedchamber Scenes, ed. Sujata Iyengar, Sarah Mayo and Nathalie Vienne-Gerrin. Arrêt sur scène/Scene Focus 8, 2019: 101-116.

• “Courtly banter in The Duchess of Malfi (3.2.1-57): not so merry”. In Scenes from The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Florence March and Nathalie Rivère de Carles. Arrêt sur scène/Scene Focus 7 (2018): 57-67.

• Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, ed. with Agnès Lafont and Charlotte Coffin. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017.

• “Trojan shadows in Shakespeare’s King John”. In Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, ed. Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont and Charlotte Coffin. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017: 86-108.

• “Erotic Perspectives: when Romeo and Juliet meet Hero and Leander”.  In Shakespeare’s Erotic Mythology and Ovidian Renaissance Culture, ed. Agnès Lafont. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013, 77-90.

• Entry on Pyramus and Thisbe. In Le Dictionnaire littéraire de la nuit, ed. Alain Montandon. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013.

• “Des murs de Pompéi aux planches de Stratford-upon-Avon: la mise en corps de la mort de Pyrame et Thisbé”. In Pyrame et Thisbé ou la mort des amants/Pyramus and Thisbe: the death of lovers, ed. Bénédicte Louvat and Janice Valls-Russell. Arrêt sur scène/Scene Focus 1, 2012: 89-103. 

• “‘As she had some good, so had she many bad parts’: Semiramis’ Transgressive Personas”, Échanges et transformations: le Moyen Âge, la Renaissance et leurs réécritures contemporaines / Exchanges and transformations: the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Contemporary Reworkings, Anglophonia 29, 2011: 103-17. Online: https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/746.

• “So pale did shine the moon on Pyramus”: Biblical Resonances of an Ovidian Myth in Titus Andronicus.  In Anagnórisis, Revista de Investigación Teatral, 2 Mitos paganos y bíblicos en el Teatro / Pagan and Biblical Myths in the Theatre (2010), 57-82.

• “Pourquoi Pyrame et Thisbé?”.  In Autour du Songe d'une nuit d'été de William Shakespeare, Proceedings of the conference organised in Rouen (22-23 November 2002), ed. Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin. Rouen: Publications de l'Université de Rouen, 2003, 137-46.

Janice VALLS-RUSSELL