Dr Eve Houghton, St John's

eh565@cam.ac.uk

 

 

Biographical Information

I am a Junior Research Fellow in English at St John’s College, Cambridge. I received my PhD in English from Yale in 2024. Before that, I received an MPhil from Cambridge and a BA from Yale. 

At Cambridge, I have supervised across the papers Shakespeare (Part IA, Paper 2); English Literature and its Contexts, 1500-1700 (Part IB, Paper 5); and Early Modern Drama 1588-1642 (Part II, Paper 7). I have supervised BA dissertations and delivered lectures in the Faculty. I am teaching a seminar for the MPhil in English Studies, 'Novel Theory, 1500-1800.' I have also taught undergraduate courses at Yale and UCL.

Research Interests

I write about early modern English prose and drama. I have particular interests in prose style, narrative theory, stage history, gender and sexuality, and the history of the book.

My forthcoming first monograph, Experimental Fictions: Representing Speech and Thought Before the Novel, argues for the narratorial innovation of early modern English prose fiction, a body of writing often marginalized and misunderstood in literary histories that position the novel as the apex of historical development. While experimental is an adjective usually applied to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel and to modernist writing, I claim the vocabulary of experiment for sixteenth-century writers, such as William Baldwin, George Gascoigne, John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, and Philip Sidney, who reimagined the literary conventions of their time for a new purpose: representing speech and thought in narrative prose fiction. Some of those experiments are unfamiliar and alienating to readers accustomed to novelistic form. Others have become paradigmatic techniques for representing subjectivity in narrative language: techniques, like interior monologue, psycho-narration, and free indirect style, retroactively recognized as signature features of the novel.  Experimental Fictions calls for a rethinking of literary value and the canon of narrative prose writing in English, showing how historical literary examples invite us to reimagine modern narrative theoretical categories.

Another forthcoming book, Masculinity and Minor Characters on the Early Modern Stage: Four Types, brings gender studies and the history of masculinity into conversation with early modern theatre studies. Each of the four chapters centres on a seventeenth-century male stage type with an aspirational or vexed relationship to genteel masculinity: the gull, the malcontent, the fop, and the booby. Considering plays by Shakespeare, John Marston, William Wycherley, and Aphra Behn, I argue for the theatrical charisma of the minor character and his ability to steal attention away from more prominent players. I draw on early dramatic criticism and theatre history research to reconstruct the work of comic actors like John Sinklo, Joseph Haines, and Cave Underhill, arguing that, while these minor characters often fail to achieve social prestige or erotic satisfaction in the world of the play, they triumph in the economy of audience attention. The book offers original archival research, including new identifications of early modern actors with particular roles, and a fresh approach to the study of masculinity that brings together theatrical criticism, stage history, and gender studies.

My scholarly articles have appeared in venues including Critical Inquiry, ELH: English Literary History, and The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. With Kate De Rycker, Andrew Hadfield, and Jennifer Richards, I am a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Thomas Nashe. I am co-editing, with Dennis Duncan, a volume of essays on the history of the book index. I am also co-editing, with Colton Valentine, a special issue of the journal Narrative on free indirect style in languages other than English. The issue includes work on French, German, Spanish, Latin, Polish, Russian, Korean, and Chinese literature. I have a strong record of public engagement through organising conferences and theatrical performances and curating library exhibitions. Most recently, I organised a two-day conference, Thomas Nashe and Voice, held at St John’s in January 2026. The conference featured three keynote talks and twenty-three papers, as well as a staged reading of Nashe’s Pierce Penniless commissioned for the event and performed by the Beyond Shakespeare Company.

Selected Publications

  • The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Nashe. Eds. Kate De Rycker, Andrew Hadfield, Eve Houghton, and Jennifer Richards. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forthcoming 2027.
  • Free Indirect Style Across Languages. Eds. Eve Houghton and Colton Valentine. Narrative Special Issue. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Forthcoming 2027. 
  • The Book Index through History. Eds. Dennis Duncan and Eve Houghton. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Forthcoming 2027.
  • ‘Jonson and Disability.’ The Oxford Handbook of Ben Jonson. Ed. Thomas MacFaul. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forthcoming 2028.
  • ‘Nashe and Narrative Theory.’ The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Nashe. Eds. Kate De Rycker, Andrew Hadfield, Eve Houghton, and Jennifer Richards. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forthcoming 2027. 
  • ‘He Said/She Said: Free Indirect Style Before the Novel.’ Critical Inquiry 51.2 (Winter 2025): 247-267.
  • ‘Fops vs Tops: Character and Attention in The Country Wife.’ ELH 90.3 (Fall 2023): 667-691.
  • ‘Private Owners, Public Books: Henrietta Bartlett’s Feminist Bibliography.’ The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 116.4 (Winter 2022): 567-587.