Profile
Joan is a Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She was awarded her PhD (on Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene) from the University of Birmingham in 1997 and since then has taught at universities in the US and UK. Her research is focused on early modern literature, including Shakespeare, and the intersection of literary and culinary cultures. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and a long-standing member of the AHRC Peer Review College (2017 - present).
She was Co-Lead on the Loughborough University Institute of Advanced Studies annual interdisciplinary theme for 2022-23 of 'Breathe', hosting two International Fellows (from Sweden and the USA). She is on the editorial boards of the journals Early Modern Culture and Global Food History and was an Advisory Board member for the project ExpoShakespeare in Milan (2013- 2016) and the major Routledge publication International Handbook of Food Studies (2011- 2013).
Joan is a member of several scholarly professional associations including the European Shakespeare Research Association, the International Health Humanities Network, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Shakespeare Association of America. She regularly peer reviews for leading publishers including Routledge and Gale Cengage and for leading peer-reviewed journals, including Studies in English Literature and Renaissance Quarterly.
She is regularly invited to present her research at international conferences and university research associations. Most recently she has been invited to deliver a panel paper at the European Shakespeare Research Association (ESRA) Annual Conference in Portugal (in July 2025) and a research paper at the University of Basel, Switzerland (December 2024). She routinely engages internationally with public-facing organizations, including the BBC. She was invited to give a public talk called "'Wolf All?' Shakespeare and Food in Renaissance England" for BBC Radio Three's series 'The Essay' (2016) as part of commemorations for Shakespeare's 400th anniversary, which was broadcast to over 2 million listeners. She also helped Spain's best-selling daily newspaper El País commemorate this anniversary by writing a piece called "When Fruit was Bad for Health" on food and eating habits in early modern England.