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.

Dr Brandon Chua gained his PhD in English Literature from The University of Melbourne. He specialises in British Literature written in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, with a particular focus on the ways in which literary texts from this period explore the relationship between liberty and subjection. His recent monograph Ravishment of Reason: Government and the Heroic Idioms of the Late Stuart Stage (Bucknell University Press, 2014) concentrates on dramatic texts by William Davenant, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Nathaniel Lee, and John Crowne,  and demonstrates how emerging understandings of the human body and its affective drives generate new dramatic visions of sovereignty and subjection in the later seventeenth century. His new research project, funded by the Research Grants Council’s Early Career Scheme, studies early modern understandings of diversity in the context of religious schism and conflict. Before coming to Hong Kong, Brandon taught at The University of Melbourne and the University of Queensland. He has held a research fellowship with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and was the recipient of the Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at The University of Queensland.

17th and 18th Century British Literature; Literature and Jacobitism; Critical Theory; History of Sexualities; Religion and Literature; History of the Novel; Shakespeare Adaptation Studies