Nick's work focuses on early modern literature, how we receive it, and why it still matters. His first book, Shakespearean Arrivals: The Birth of Character (Cambridge University Press, 2018), developed a new model of Shakespeare’s character formation. His second book, Shakespeare’s Political Sprit: Negative Theology and the Disruption of Power (Cambridge UP, 2024), reorients how we understand “politics” in Shakespeare by reading his drama as a negative mode of political thought. It seeks to give a sustained account of negativity as a powerful creative force that enables new, disruptive political imaginaries. His work has also been published in journals such as Modern Philology, Shakespeare Survey, and Law & Literature. Nick is currently working on a third monograph, “Resurrection Events in Late Shakespeare”, which has been funded by the Hong Kong University Grants Committee. The project re-examines the vexed question of Shakespeare’s engagement with religion by investigating a striking religious feature of Shakespeare’s late plays: his staging of resurrection scenes. Nick was previously a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800) and earned his DPhil and MSt from the University of Oxford, funded by a Rhodes Scholarship. He holds degrees in Law and Arts from the University of Queensland and is the Deputy Director of HKU’s BA&LLB programme.

Nick’s research focuses on Shakespeare and early modern literature, but also branches out into intellectual history, literary theory, politics, law and literature, and the intersection of theology and poetics.

Anjuli I. Gunaratne grew up in Colombo, Sri Lanka and received her Ph.D. in English and the Interdisciplinary Humanities at Princeton University. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Hong Kong’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities (2018-2020) and at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, where she was the Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow (2017-2018). Her work has appeared in PMLA (Publication of the Modern Language Association), the CLR James Journal, Research in African Literatures, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

Anjuli’s first book, Miraculous Corpse: Tragedy and the Underworlds of Anticolonialism is in press at Duke University Press and slated for publication in 2027. Miraculous Corpse tracks the emergence of a genre of anticolonial poetics that draws from the structures of tragic drama and thought to recover revolutionary figures, political ideas, communities, and ecologies lost to colonial expansion and occupation. The miraculous names, then, a tragically conceived process of poetic invention and historical recovery that is anticolonial in a minor key. As a whole, Anjuli’s research engages issues pertaining to the relationship between literary and architectural form, the narration of trauma, and the process of recovering and representing the past in literary works, particularly when the past is unwritten or purposefully disappeared.