Anna-Rose Shack is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Historical Studies (ASH) at the University of Amsterdam.

Her NWO-funded research project entitled "Languages of Vulnerability in Early Modern Women's Poetry", analyses the diverse ways in which sixteenth and seventeenth-century female poets represent and articulate vulnerable selfhood in lyric poetry. This project examines how poets such as Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, Hester Pulter and Margaret Cavendish engage with discourses of vulnerability as they articulate embodied emotional experience. 

Previously, Anna-Rose studied English and Theatre studies at the University of Melbourne with a focus on twentieth-century Irish literature. She then completed an RMA in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis entitled “Occupation on the Home Front: Shakespeare’s Soldiers in Civilian Life”. 

Anna-Rose is passionate about bringing literature to life through public outreach and performance. For example, she recently delivered a workshop on faith and poetry at the Krijtberg Catholic Church and peformed The Art of Imagination: A Staged Reading in celebration of International Women’s Day 2023 at the University of Amsterdam. 

In December 2020, Anna-Rose was one of the founding members of an international graduate student network/reading group, broadly focused on seventeenth-century women’s poetry; the group continues to meet online monthly and warmly welcomes new graduate students working in the field. Anna-Rose currently serves as the ASH (Amsterdam School of Historical Studies) PhD representative and on the Parergon early career committee (https://parergon.org/index.php/parergon).

In the 2023-2024 academic year, Anna-Rose will teach on the BA course Shakespeare in Focus. 

Anna-Rose has previously co-taught Authors in Focus: Renaissance Women Writers (BA) with Dr Kristine Johanson. This course was nominated for the Faculty of Humanities Onderwijsprijs/Teaching Award 2023.

Anna-Rose has also taught Shakespeare and Early Modern English Literature (a second year BA core module) and designed and taught an MA tutorial entitled The Lyric Self: Early Modern Women’s Poetry, at the University of Groningen (2021-22), as well as a range of academic writing support courses at the University of Amsterdam's Writing Centre (2020-21). 

June 2023: “Oh, thought I, mock on”: faith, false accusations, and forms of vulnerability in The Narrative of the Persecution of Agnes Beaumont and Elizabeth Cellier’s Malice Defeated, presentation at the Women and Religion: Dissenters, Workers, Writers in the Early Modern European Context (1500-1700) conference, University College Dublin (Dublin, Ireland).

December 2022: “To all eternity I’ll sing / In unknown lays”: Hester Pulter’s lyric voice and the editorial and pedagogical affordances of The Pulter Project, presentation at the Women Writers in History: Digital Approaches to Women’s Book Culture symposium, Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands).

October 2022: “The people did so laugh and roar”: superiority humour and regulating behaviour in Hester Pulter’s emblems, conference presentation at the Feeling Form/Forming Feeling?: Dialectics of Affect and Form in Anglophone Women’s Writing, 1550-1800 conference, Ghent University. Anna-Rose was one of the co-organisers of this conference and the associated ECR workshop (https://www.feelingform2022.ugent.be),  (Ghent, Belgium).

 July 2022: Walking with Whitney: Perambulatory Poetics and Authorial Independence, invited guest lecture for the Australian Reseach Council Centre for the History of Emotions and the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group, University of Western Australia (Perth, Australia).

June 2022: “If now they strived for the golden Ball”: beauty, patronage and fashioning authorial identity in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, conference presentation at the ANZAMEMS annual conference, University of Western Australia (Perth, Australia). 

November 2021: “The stories we tell”: The Globe Theatre’s Emilia, feminism and early modern women’s writing, invited guest lecture for an MA research seminar at the University of Groningen (Groningen, the Netherlands). 

March 2021: Reading Japanese Gardens, invited guest lecture for the Friends of the Oriental Museum (Durham, UK).

July 2019: Performing Monstrosity in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, conference panel participation at the biennial European Shakespeare Research Association Conference, Roma Tre (Rome, Italy).

July 2016: Gathering Voices and Telling the story – The 1916 Rising in 2016, invited speaker at the “Visions Past and Present: 1916 Centenary” seminar, University of Notre Dame (Perth, Australia).