For Dr Kenneth Crowther, the journey to his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) at the University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) was the culmination of years of study, research, and reflection.
What began as an undergraduate degree grew into a passion for research, taking him through postgraduate study and ultimately to the completion of his PhD, The Paradox of Enchantment: Syncretising Humoralism, Demonology, and Meteorology on the Early Modern English Stage, in October 2025.
By examining how history, religion and philosophy were intertwined in the 16th and 17th centuries, his research offers new ways of reading the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
We recently spoke with Kenneth about the academic and personal influences that shaped his research, the value of his interdisciplinary approach, and what comes next.
When did you first become interested in early modern religious history? Was there a particular moment, text or class that sparked your curiosity?
I completed my undergraduate study at UniSQ back in 2010, and both of my PhD supervisors, Dr Darryl Chalk and Professor Laurie Johnson, taught me back then as well. It was working with them that inspired my interest in this field. While neither of them specifically taught religious history, in first learning about the history of literature and theatre, it was clear how religion played a pivotal shaping role in the way that poems, novels and plays were formed. It became more and more evident to me that things were more complicated than they seem – that is, any event or phenomenon always had so many interlocking and interdependent causes. This is why I became interested in history, religion, and philosophy, because these elements always seemed to be at work under the surface. This also combined with my own personal journey of becoming a Catholic, which I did during my PhD study. So studying the impact of the Reformation on Shakespeare was more than just theory for me; it helped to shape the way I saw and thought about the world.
What inspired you to choose this topic for your thesis?
I had a pre-existing interest in the medieval sin of acedia because of my interest in the history of religion, particularly the flux of Catholicism and Protestantism in England after the Reformation. My PhD is framed by disenchantment theory, and was a continuation of my Master's thesis, which started out as a study of acedia in Shakespeare. I concluded that in early modern England, acedia became subsumed into humoralism through melancholy, and also in demonic oppression. The combination of these two fields of experience (humoralism and demonism) seemed very common in early modern England, which suggested further investigation.
Why did this research feel important, and what was missing from the conversation?
A lot of scholars over the last two decades have written about the relevance of humoralism, or demonology, or climate studies in Shakespeare and early modern theatre and culture. But none had written specifically on their overlap and interdependence – what I called the syncretic nexus of demonic geohumoralism. In short, I read cultural artefacts produced in the century from 1550 to 1650, in order to understand how these three fields overlapped: humoralism, which is the theory of the four humors that dominated the medical field at the time; demonology, which was the almost ubiquitous belief in the impact of demons upon the natural world; and meteorology, which included natural weather phenomena like storms and earthquakes, as well as the movement of the stars and astrology. These three fields were not independent, but were syncretised into a coherent (though for us, seemingly contradictory) epistemological nexus. The evidence for this interaction was then outlined in numerous plays by William Shakespeare and John Webster.
In what ways did receiving a Vice-Chancellor's Scholarship in 2022 help you as you progressed through your PhD?
Receiving this generous scholarship from UniSQ allowed me to work part time throughout my study, which really helped me to be able to complete it in three years. I was a full time teacher before commencing this study, so this allowed me to do part time consulting work and study, while still supporting my family. I have five children, so the juggle of work, study, and family was tricky, and the Scholarship made a big difference. It also gave me the opportunity to attend the British Shakespeare Association Conference in Liverpool in 2023, and the Shakespeare Association of America Conference in Boston in 2025, as well as to conduct research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC.
What did you learn through the process of completing your thesis?
I learnt a lot about writing, about how to take such a massive and ungainly topic and wrestle it down into something hopefully not only legible but enjoyable to read. And I learnt a lot about early modern culture – that they were not that different from us, particularly in their ability to hold seemingly contradictory concepts in their mind, and to hold onto vestiges of magical thinking – much of which modern people might think we have surpassed, but which linger on in surprising ways.
Who do you hope will benefit most from your findings?
I hope my research reveals to us something deeply human about early moderns, about the way they understood life, and therefore it reveals layers of meaning in these plays previously invisible to a modern reader. The benefit will be to anyone interested in cultural history, including in the history of science, medicine, religion, theatre, literature, and philosophy.
Now that you've completed the PhD, what are you most excited about?
Both of my examiners recommended publication of the PhD, which was really exciting and edifying. To be encouraged by the foremost leaders in the field – two people that shaped my own approach and influenced my thinking so much, was pretty surreal. So, in 2026 I will be working on refining the thesis for publication, and hopefully it might come out early 2027.
What kinds of future research do you hope will build on this work?
My hope is that recognising the complexity of the enchanted world that Shakespeare inhabited becomes more of the norm, and that historical approaches that foreground the lived experience and epistemological perspectives of early moderns take into account the syncretic nexus that lies at the heart of early modernity. In short, I hope that future studies on humoralism or embodiment, or the weather or stars, or demons and religion, tend more towards a syncretising of these positions, rather than reading each in a void, disconnected from each other – which I believe is a far more 21st century approach to reality, and not in alignment with the early modern experience.
What advice would you give to students or researchers currently working on their thesis?
Read a lot. Write a lot. And enjoy it.
