Ellie Milne

Cut, Click, Copy, Keep: Fashioning Melancholic Girlhood in the Afterlives of Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroines
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Eleanor Milne (Ellie) is a PhD researcher in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute. Her research examines how nineteenth-century visual culture continues to shape the aesthetic language and emotional lives of girls in the twenty-first century. She brings together Shakespearean afterlives, visual culture, affect theory, and girlhood studies. In doing so, she investigates how inherited images and narratives of femininity are collected, remediated, and reimagined through contemporary practices of digital curation and self-fashioning. Focusing on Shakespeare’s tragic heroines and their nineteenth-century visual reception, her doctoral research explores how girls negotiate identity through acts of collecting and assemblage, from Victorian scrapbooks to platforms such as Pinterest and Tumblr. Treating scrapbooking and digital assemblage as both historical objects and critical methods, Ellie considers how visual collections function as archives of feeling, self-making, and sites of cultural memory. Her work argues that practices often dismissed as ephemeral or domestic are significant forms of cultural production through which girls inherit, reproduce, and transform enduring myths of femininity. Ellie holds a BA in English and Classical Literature and Civilisation and an MA in History of Art from the University of Birmingham.