Ben Higgins joined Lady Margaret Hall as Career Development Fellow in English Literature in October 2021 after training at Exeter University and the University of Oxford. He has held lectureships at Corpus Christi College, Lincoln College, and the University of London, and research fellowships at the Huntington Library and the Folger Library among others. His first monograph, Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade was published by Oxford University Press in March 2022.

Higgins’s research focuses on the literary and material cultures of the early modern period, with particular focus on Shakespeare, book history, and editorial practice. He has published essays on early Shakespearean libraries, on feminist book history, and on the conceptual status of early modern bookshops, among other topics. He is also particularly interested in forms of collaboration and in promoting reflective conversations about the shape of early modern studies amid an era of scholarly haste.

Higgins’s first book, Shakespeare’s Syndicate, offers a fresh account of how the most important document in the history of the Shakespearean text was published. The monograph presents a series of bibliographically rigorous yet interpretively creative readings of how the book trade created Shakespeare’s First Folio. Higgins’s current projects involve an examination of the relationship between literature and space in the early modern period, for a book co-authored with Dr Alice Leonard of Coventry University and under contract to Cambridge University Press.