Dr John Lavagnino is Reader in Digital Humanities, working in early modern literature. He has spent time in a number of other fields: physics, atmospheric science, American literature, and modernism, in particular. He came to King’s in 1998, via Harvard University, Brandeis University, the Smithsonian Institution and Brown University, to what was then called the Centre for Computing in the Humanities. Since 2009 Dr Lavagnino has been a member of the King’s Department of English as well; he has also spent time as a visiting scholar at the National University of Ireland in Galway and at Tsuda College in Tokyo.
His current work focuses on early modern drama from 1580 to 1642, and in particular its reception since the closing of the theatres in 1642: while Shakespeare’s works have always been popular on stage and in print, the reputations of other playwrights of the era have had enormous swings from fame to oblivion and back, and Dr Lavagnino is working to trace this history and its driving forces in more detail.
Dr Lavagnino was one of the general editors of The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, a vast collaborative project to publish the writings of the great Jacobean playwright; it won the Modern Language Association’s Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition in 2009. More recently he has been one of the creators of the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700, a free online guide to the manuscripts of major authors from Skelton to Congreve, published in 2013.