Taylor Hare

I am a fifth-year PhD candidate in English. My primary academic interests are in early modern literary culture, book history, disability history, and the digital humanities.

My doctoral dissertation, entitled "Reading Access: Disability and the History of the Shakespearean Text," brings book history and disability studies together to examine the various ways in which editors, printers, and publishers have defined and acted upon the principle of accessibility in the presentation of Shakespeare’s plays. By reading key Shakespearean book-objects through the lens of access, from the First Folio to the first tactile editions, this project reveals how implicit and explicit claims to accessibility have animated the Shakespearean textual tradition from its earliest moments, and it demonstrates the importance of comparing these claims with the lived experiences of readers.

My writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Inscription, and the Journal of Early Modern Studies. My scholarship has been funded by grants from Princeton University Libraries and Smith College Special Collections as well as a Mellon Foundation Fellowship jointly awarded by the Library Company of Philadelphia and Historical Society of Pennsylvania and a Predoctoral Fellowship from Penn State's Center for Humanities and Information.