Bernadette Myers

Bernadette Myers is a scholar of early modern English literature and culture, specializing in theater, the environmental humanities, and the material culture of early modern London. Her current book project, The Nature of London: Urban Ecology and the Early Modern English Stage, argues that Shakespeare and his contemporaries developed concepts, practices, and habits of mind that informed early attitudes and expectations about urban sustainability. Drawing on archaeological evidence and urban environmental history, "The Nature of London" resituates the rise of the theater industry within an unprecedented environmental crisis facing London at the end of the sixteenth century. Ultimately, her project illustrates how the material and imaginative resources of dramatic form helped to reconstitute the city as a co-fabrication between human and nonhuman forces, long before the phrase "urban ecology" emerged in scientific discourse. An article taken from this project has been published in Shakespeare Quarterly. Other articles and reviews on archive theory and premodern ecologies have been published in the Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment.   Prior to joining NYU, Myers was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she taught a wide range of courses including composition, the introduction to the English major, and the flagship "great books" seminar, Literature Humanities. In fall 2018, she served as the program coordinator for the Columbia in London program, in partnership with Queen Mary University, where she co-taught "London in Postcolonial Fiction." Her research has been supported by the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Shakespeare Association of America, which awarded her the J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize in 2022.