Claire Hansen

Dr Claire Hansen is an award-winning educator. She is Lecturer in English at the Australian National University and Adjunct Senior Lecturer in English and Writing at JCU. She is a Fellow (FHEA) of the Higher Education Academy (Advance HE). Claire coordinated the first year core English subjects at JCU, in addition to coordinating senior subjects on Shakespeare, ecocriticism and environmental literature. She was also Co-Coordinator of the English Major for two years (2019-2020).

Claire specialises in Shakespeare studies. She is a member of the Shakespeare Reloaded project, an ongoing collaborative project exploring innovative approaches to teaching and learning at secondary and tertiary institutions. She assists in the management of the Shakespeare Reloaded website and writes regularly for the Shakespeare Reloaded blog.

Her book, Shakespeare and Complexity Theory, was published by Routledge in 2017. Claire has also published on Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, education, early modern dance, and female characters in renaissance literature.

Claire's current projects include place-based approaches to Shakespeare, Shakespearean blue humanities, and the health humanities (see below for more).

She is also passionate about theatre, and has published a host of theatre reviews on The Conversation and on the Shakespeare Reloaded blog.

In 2020, Claire was the recipient of a JCU Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning, and was also the overall winner of this award.

Claire completed her PhD at the University of Sydney, where her research focused on the use of complexity theory in Shakespeare studies and in education.

Current research projects

Place-based Shakespeare

Claire's current research is centred on Shakespeare and place. She has recently published articles in TEXT Journal and Critical Survey. As part of her place-based project, Claire has collaborated with local theatre company TheatreiNQ and is collecting data on secondary and tertiary student experiences of place in relation to the teaching and learning of Shakespeare.

In 2021, she presented her work on place-based Shakespeare pedagogy at Shakespeare's Globe Climate Emergency Symposium, Globe4Globe.

She has a book forthcoming with Cambridge Elements on Shakespeare and Place-Based Learning (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Blue Humanities Lab

Claire is co-chair of the Blue Humanities Lab, a multidisciplinary research initiative centred on the ‘blue’ spaces of our world – reefs, oceans, rivers, and inland bodies of waters. She has several peer-reviewed articles and chapters forthcoming on Shakespeare and the Blue Humanities.

The Heart of the Matter

In 2018 Claire launched a Health Humanities working group at JCU. The group's first initiative is "The Heart of the Matter", a multidisciplinary investigation into figurative and literal representations of the heart. Find out more about The Heart of the Matter.

In 2020, Claire produced a podcast with Dr Bríd Phillips (Lecturer in Health Humanities at University of Western Australia) on 'What is (health) humanities for?'. You can access the podcast here. She is also co-convening a seminar on Shakespeare and Health at the 2022 Shakespeare Association of America Conference.

In 2021, Claire's co-authored article on Shakespeare, artificial hearts and the pulse was published in Medical Humanities.