Research interests center around Shakespeare, performance, memory, and skill. She explores theatrical history through the lens of Distributed Cognition, asking how Shakespeare’s company met the astonishing cognitive demands of their profession, particularly the performance of up to six different plays a week.

Tribble is the author of Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Virginia, 1993), Writing Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital Age (with Anne Trubek, Longmans, 2003), Cognitive Ecologies and the History of Remembering (with Nicholas Keene, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body (Arden Bloomsbury, 2017), and The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Science (with Howard Marchitello, Palgrave, 2017). She has also published articles in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Studies, and Textual Practice, and ELH, among others. Current research projects include the Arden 4 edition of Merry Wives of Windsor, and a book on magic and performance in early modern England.