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.
Joan is currently completing a monograph on Shakespeare and Hospitality (forthcoming with Routledge in 2025). This will be her seventh monograph to date. Recent journal articles include "Reimagining This Creature: Hospitality and Autohagiography in the visions of Margery Kempe" in History, the journal of the Historical Association, 2021, vol. 106, pp.561-577 and "The Merchant of Venice and the demise of hospitality" in the Routledge journal Shakespeare, 2021, vol. 18, pp.24-45.
Joan is the leading expert in a scholarly sub-field she inaugurated by publishing the first monograph on it: Shakespeare and Food (Ashgate 2007). Her authority in this field is regularly cited by others in scholarly works including editions of Shakespeare's plays. She has helped spread this new field's roots further into literary history, principally by her most recent books--Three Sixteenth-Century Dietaries (Manchester University Press, 2017) and A History of Food in Literature (Routledge 2017)--which show how literary criticism
Joan specializes in teaching early modern and medieval literature, but has taught all periods, genres, and critical theory. She is responsible for introducing the teaching of medieval literature and culture at Loughborough University. She currently leads the advanced level undergraduate module 'Adapting Shakespeare' that considers Shakespeare's scripts in the context of his sources and modern film adaptations.
Joan is currently Principal Supervisor for the Doctoral Researcher Keiran Fairhurst on his thesis "Indulgence in Early Modern Poetry: Wyatt, Shakespeare, Donne".
She has supervised the following PhDs to completion at Loughborough as Principal Supervisor:
- Chloe Owen, "‘My dream was lengthened after life’: Sleep, Hallucinations and the Supernatural in Early-Modern Drama" (2021)
- Amir Andwari, "The Return of the Abject: A Psychoanalytic Analysis of a Selection of Shakespeare's Plays in the Light of Julia Kristeva's Theories of the Mind" (2018)
She has served as External Examiner for PhDs at University College London and Anglia Ruskin University.
She welcomes candidates for PhD supervision on any aspect of medieval or early modern literature and culture including Shakespeare and on Health Humanities.
- Reimagining This Creature: Hospitality and Autohagiography in the visions of Margery Kempe" in History, the journal of the Historical Association, 2021, vol. 106, pp.561-577
- "The Merchant of Venice and the demise of hospitality" in the Routledge journal Shakespeare, 2021, vol. 18, pp.24-45.
- Three Sixteenth Century Dietaries: A Critical Edition, Revels Companion Library, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017, ISBN 9780719081132, 331 pp.
- A History of Food in Literature from the Fourteenth Century to the Present co-authored with Charlotte Boyce, London: Routledge, 2017, ISBN 9780415840514, 313pp.
- "Diet and Identity in Early Modern Dietaries and Shakespeare: The Inflections of Nationality, Gender, Social Rank and Age" Shakespeare Studies, Volume 42, 2014, pp.75-90, ISSN: 0582-9399.
- Shakespeare and the Language of Food: A Dictionary, Continuum/Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries, London: Bloomsbury (formerly Continuum), 2010, ISBN 9781441179982, 480 pp.
- Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories, London: Routledge (formerly Ashgate), 2010, ISBN 9780754664277, 170 pp.
- Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays, London: Routledge (formerly Ashgate), 2007, ISBN 0754655474, 176 pp.