Lydia Valentine

Lydia Valentine is a third-year PhD candidate working across King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe as part of LAHP’S Collaborative Doctoral Award programme. She is currently the blog editor for the Early Modern Scholars of Colour Network (EMSOC) and one of the organisers of ‘The Abstract’ research seminar series at KCL. Her research examines the relationship between race, kinship and embodiment in early modern drama. Drawing on Premodern Critical Race Studies and kinship theory, the project interrogates what it means to be kin in early modern England. She argues that kinship was intensely racialised, and that this manifests most clearly in the exclusionary forces of kinship (who is and isn’t considered kin) and the policing of kinship within early modern English culture (who is allowed or denied the right to claim kinship).