Featured Scholars
Michael Dobson
Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham and Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon
Michael Dobson is Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon and Professor of Shakespeare Studies, University of Birmingham. His previous employers include the Universities of London, Oxford, and Harvard, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Professor Dobson is a General Editor of the Arden Performance Editions of Shakespeare series, an honorary governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, a Member of Council of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Chair of Trustees of Flute Theatre, and co-director of the Shakespeare Centre, China. His research focuses not only on Shakespeare’s own works but also on how they have been creatively adapted by actors, scholars, directors, philosophers, composers, critics, and artists across time and space. His lecturing and research on Shakespeare have so far taken him to over 30 different countries; in 2020 he was awarded the International Shakespeare Prize of Romania, and he holds Romanian and Swedish honorary degrees, an honorary membership of the Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre, and an honorary professorship at Henan Normal University in China. He works as a frequent consultant to theatre directors and actors producing Shakespeare’s plays. Professor Dobson is the author and editor of numerous books and articles, including Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Performing Shakespeare's Tragedies Today: the Actor's Perspective (editor, Cambridge University Press, 2006), England's Elizabeth: an afterlife in fame and fantasy (with Nicola J. Watson, Oxford University Press, 2002), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (co-editor with Stanley Wells, Oxford University Press, 2001), and The Making of the National Poet (Oxford University Press, 1992). Professor Dobson’s work Shakespeare: A Playgoer's and Reader's Guide (co-edited with Stanley Wells, Oxford University Press, 2020) is now available to pre-order.
Ewan Fernie
Chair, Professor and Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, Culture Lead of the College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham, and Director of the ‘Everything to Everybody’ Project
Ewan Fernie is Chair, Professor and Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, and Culture Lead of the College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham. He is Director of the major lottery-funded ‘Everything to Everybody’ Project, which aims to revive and renew the world’s first great Shakespeare library and Birmingham’s broader reputation as a trailblazer for publicly owned culture: https://everythingtoeverybody.bham.ac.uk/. Fernie’s books include: Shame in Shakespeare; The Demonic: Literature and Experience; Shakespeare for Freedom; (with Simon Palfrey) ‘Macbeth, Macbeth’; Spiritual Shakespeares; (with Ramona Wray, Mark Burnett and Clare McManus) Reconceiving the Renaissance; Redcrosse: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today’s World; (with Tobias Döring) Thomas Mann and Shakespeare: Something Rich and Strange; and (with Paul Edmondson) New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity. For many years, he co-edited the groundbreaking ‘Shakespeare Now!’ series with Palfrey. He has held visiting positions at Eton College, the Centre for Advanced Study at the University of Munich, and at the University of Queensland (twice). In 2018, he hosted Radical Mischief: Inviting Experiment in Theatre, Thought and Politics at The Other Place with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Deputy Director, Erica Whyman. He has recently written a play called Marina with Katharine Craik, and he is leading an additional funded project called Serious About Comedy with Sean Foley, the Artistic Director of Birmingham REP. The book he is currently writing is titled The Dirty History of Hope.
Stephen Foley
Associate Professor of English and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University
Stephen Foley is Associate Professor of English and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. His research focuses on European Renaissance culture and letters, classical traditions, literary theory, and aesthetics. He is the author of numerous scholarly books, chapters, and articles, including Sir Thomas Wyatt (Twayne Publishers, 1990). He has served as chair of the Department of English at Brown, as the editor of Modern Language Studies, and as research editor for the Yale Edition of the Works of Thomas More.
Stephen Greenblatt
John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University
Stephen Greenblatt is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of fourteen books, including Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics; The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve; The Swerve: How the World Became Modern; Shakespeare's Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Marvelous Possessions; and Renaissance Self-Fashioning. He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Shakespeare, has edited seven collections of criticism, and is a founding editor of the journal Representations. His honors include the 2016 Holberg Prize from the Norwegian Parliament, the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 National Book Award for The Swerve, MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize (twice), Harvard University’s Cabot Fellowship, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, Yale’s Wilbur Cross Medal, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. Among his named lecture series are the Adorno Lectures in Frankfurt, the University Lectures at Princeton, and the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford, and he has held visiting professorships at universities in Beijing, Kyoto, London, Paris, Florence, Torino, Trieste, and Bologna, as well as the Renaissance residency at the American Academy in Rome. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and a long-term fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. He has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Philosophical Society, and the Italian literary academy Accademia degli Arcadi.
Farah Karim-Cooper
Professor of Shakespeare Studies, King’s College London, and Head of Higher Education & Research at Shakespeare’s Globe
Farah Karim-Cooper is Professor of Shakespeare Studies, King’s College London and Head of Higher Education & Research at Shakespeare’s Globe. She currently serves as Vice-President of the Shakespeare Association of America and as a member of the Advisory Council for the Warburg Institute. She is also an executive board member for RaceB4Race, a consortium of Scholars and institutions that seek racial justice in the field of pre-modern literary studies, and is creating the first Scholars of Colour network in the UK. Karim-Cooper is also a General Editor for Arden’s Shakespeare in the Theatre series and their Critical Intersections Series. She has written and edited numerous scholarly reviews, articles, and books, including Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh University Press, 2006, revised ed. 2019) and The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (Arden, 2016). She is currently writing a book on Shakespeare and Race.
Photo credit: Ander McIntyre.
Paulina Kewes
Professor of English Literature; Helen Morag Tutorial Fellow, Jesus College, University of Oxford
Paulina Kewes is Professor of English Literature at Jesus College at the University of Oxford (Jesus College faculty page; University of Oxford faculty page). She is a scholar of history and literature with expertise in early modern English politics and drama, above all the plays of Shakespeare. Professor Kewes took her DPhil at Jesus College, Oxford in 1996 and returned to Jesus College as a Tutorial Fellow in 2003. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and serves on the Oxford English Monographs Committee and the editorial boards of The Huntington Library Quarterly, Postgraduate English and Critical Survey. Professor Kewes is a developer of the Holinshed Project and was a co-investigator for the AHRC-funded Stuart Successions Project, which explored succession literature from James I to Queen Anne and led to the development of Stuarts Online. She is the author or editor of numerous scholarly works, including Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710 (Oxford, 1998); Stuart Succession Literature: Moments and Transformations (Oxford, 2019); and Ancient Rome in English Political Culture, c. 1570-1670 (special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly, 83: 3, 2020). She is completing a monograph entitled Contesting the Royal Succession in Reformation England: More to Shakespeare for Oxford University Press, which culminates with a novel reading of Hamlet.
Russ Leo
Associate Professor of English at Princeton University
Russ Leo is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Princeton University. He studies early modern literature and philosophy as well as theory since the 1940s, paying particular attention to labor and social reproduction as well as to the long histories of Spinozism in Marxism, psychoanalysis, and other theoretical traditions. Leo received his PhD in 2009 from the Program in Literature at Duke University, where he also received certificates in Feminist Studies and Interdisciplinary Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He joined the English Department in 2012, after a three-year tenure as a Perkins-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. Leo’s first book, Tragedy as Philosophy in Reformation Europe (Oxford University Press, 2019) traces the emergence of distinctly philosophical ideas of tragedy, irreducible to drama or performance, inextricable from rhetoric, dialectic, and metaphysics. Leo is currently at work on two book manuscripts. The first, tentatively titled Paleoliberalism and Racial Capitalism, is a study of early modern political economy, exploring how foundational works of economic and philosophical anthropology obscure real processes of racialization, dispossession, and capture by advancing seemingly-neutral, self-evident, and ahistorical terms like “market,” “labor,” and “property”; the second work is a study of the international Antipsychiatry “movement” between the 1930s and the 1980s.
Philip Lorenz
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell University
Philip Lorenz is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell University, where he teaches courses on Shakespeare, Spanish and English Renaissance drama and literary theory. His research focuses on the concept of sovereignty in early modern England and Spain. His 2013 book, The Tears of Sovereignty, Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama examined the representation of sovereignty in paradigmatic plays of English and Golden Age drama, and his current project “Baroque Files” follows the afterlives of that story as the concept of sovereignty moves away from the symbolism of sacred kings into increasingly fragmented and abstract forms.
Julia Reinhard Lupton
Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine; Co-director of the New Swan Shakespeare Center
Julia Reinhard Lupton is professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where she co-directs the New Swan Shakespeare Center. She is the author or co-author of five books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life, Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life, and Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology. Editorial projects include Shakespeare and Virtue: A Handbook (with Donovan Sherman) and Shakespeare and Hospitality (with David Goldstein). She is a former Guggenheim Fellow and a former Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. She is a dedicated community teacher who loves sharing Shakespeare broadly.
Joyce MacDonald
Professor of English at the University of Kentucky
Joyce MacDonald is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. MacDonald’s new book, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory in the New World, was published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan and explores MacDonald’s particular fascination with how race appears in early modern drama and how it can function in post-Renaissance responses to Shakespeare's plays and poems. In 2018, MacDonald was elected a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, and she is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Shakespeare Studies and Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, as well as of two book series, Palgrave Shakespeare Studies and Cambridge Elements in Shakespeare and Text. This year, MacDonald will begin a term on the executive committee of the Adaptation Studies Forum of the Modern Language Association. MacDonald is also in the process of editing two early modern plays: Aphra Behn's Abdelazer, for the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series from University of Toronto Press, and Antony and Cleopatra, for Cambridge Shakespeare Editions.
Laurie Maguire
Professor of English Language and Literature; Tutorial Fellow, Magdalen College, University of Oxford
Laurie Maguire is Professor of English Language and Literature at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. Her research encompasses textual studies, editing, Elizabethan performance, classical influences on Renaissance writers, contemporary performances of Shakespeare’s plays, and feminist criticism. Professor Maguire specializes in Shakespeare, but her dramatic interests range from ancient Greece to contemporary theatre. From 2006-08, she held a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship to complete her book, Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Professor Maguire is the author and editor of numerous articles and books written for both academic and popular audiences, including The Rhetoric of the Book (Oxford, 2020), 30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (with Emma Smith, Blackwell, 2012), Shakespeare’s Names (Oxford, 2007), and Where There's A Will There's A Way, Or, All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Shakespeare (Penguin, 2006), a book that shows how the dilemmas illustrated in Shakespeare’s plays can help readers explore their own emotions and judgments.
Simon Palfrey
Professor of English Literature; Tutorial Fellow, Brasenose College, University of Oxford
Simon Palfrey is Professor of English at Brasenose College at the University of Oxford. His recent work explores the unique kinds of life generated by dramatic, poetic, and fictional forms and the opportunities this opens up for more imaginative, philosophically adventurous, and politically engaged critical work. His books include Doing Shakespeare (Arden, 2004; 2nd ed. 2011), a TLS International Book of the Year; Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford, 2007, with Tiffany Stern), the MRDS Book of the Year; Poor Tom (Chicago, 2014); Shakespeare's Possible Worlds (Cambridge, 2014); and the novel Macbeth, Macbeth (Bloomsbury, 2016, written with Ewan Fernie). Professor Palfrey’s current project is the twice AHRC-award-winning Demons Land: a poem come true, a mixed media event (film, drama, dance, paintings, sculptures, soundscapes, text) that imagines an island built in the image of Spenser’s epic poem, The Faerie Queene. Professor Palfrey is writer and director of the project, whose latest iteration is a collaboration with indigenous Australian artists and practitioners, exploring different understandings of home, land, and country; for more details, see demonsland.com.
Michael Schoenfeldt
John R. Knott, Jr. Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Michael Schoenfeldt is John R. Knott, Jr. Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Professor Schoenfeldt teaches and researches Renaissance poetry and a wide variety of subjects in Renaissance culture, including medicine, gender, sexuality, sensation, interiority, and Renaissance understandings of the body and the passions. He is the author and editor of numerous scholarly books and articles, including John Donne in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2019), The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Professor Schoenfeldt is also the editor of A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Blackwell, 2006). He has forthcoming books on seventeenth-century poetry and on John Donne.
James Simpson
Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University
James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University (2004-). His most recent books are: Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Harvard University Press, 2007); Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2010); and Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (Harvard University Press, 2019). He is co-editor, with Christopher Cannon, of The Oxford Chaucer (forthcoming).
Emma Smith
Professor of Shakespeare Studies; Tutorial Fellow in English and Fellow Librarian, Hertford College, University of Oxford
Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College at the University of Oxford. She is a scholar of Shakespeare and early modern drama, whose research interests span performance, book history, histories of reading, reception and criticism of Shakespeare, and pedagogy. Professor Smith has written and edited numerous works for a range of audiences, including monographs on Shakespeare’s First Folio (Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book; The Making of the First Folio), companions and introductions to Shakespeare’s work (The Cambridge Guide to Shakespeare; The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare) and books written for a general readership (This Is Shakespeare; Thirty Great Myths About Shakespeare [with Laurie Maguire]). Professor Smith aims to share scholarly research with the widest possible audience, through books, articles, and lectures, and also through consultation on films and theatre productions, radio and media appearances, and podcasts, including her acclaimed lecture series Approaching Shakespeare.
Tiffany Stern, FBA
Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon
Professor Stern is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon. Her work combines literary criticism with theatre and book history and editing from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. She held posts at the University of Oxford and the University of London before coming to the Shakespeare Institute in 2017. Many theatre companies have drawn on her research on early modern performance, including the Blackfriars Playhouse, Virginia, USA; the New American Shakespeare Tavern, Georgia, USA; the Grassroots Shakespeare Co in Utah, USA; and the Queen’s Men Players in Toronto, Canada. She has lectured widely, including at the Globe, the National Theatre, the Sam Wanamaker Theatre, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and universities around the world. She has written and edited numerous articles and books, including Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare's England (Bloomsbury, 2019), Documents of Early Modern Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2009; winner of the 2010 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies), Shakespeare in Parts (with Simon Palfrey; Oxford University Press, 2007; winner of the 2009 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies), and Making Shakespeare (Routledge, 2004). She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.
Gordon Teskey
Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English at Harvard University
Gordon Teskey is Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English at Harvard University. He is author of Allegory and Violence, Delirious Milton, Spenserian Moments, and The Poetry of John Milton, which received received the Christian Gauss Prize for literary criticism and the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Book Award. Teskey is editor of The Norton Edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (the second, expanded edition published in 2020) and has been named Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America. Among his wide-ranging essays Teskey has written on Shakespearean metatheatre and poetic styles in Shakespeare’s plays. He is an advisory editor for, and a contributor to, the Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Humanities Research Fellowships, and a Visiting Research Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford.
Will Tosh
Head of Research at Shakespeare’s Globe, London
Dr. Will Tosh is Head of Research at Shakespeare’s Globe, London. He coordinates the Globe’s on-going Research in Action series of public workshops, and he led the Indoor Performance Practice Project, which examined playing in the candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. This project was the basis of his second book, Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (Bloomsbury, 2018). Dr. Tosh also researches the rhetoric and application of Renaissance theories of ‘perfect’ friendship, the subject of his first book, Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare’s England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). He is currently working on Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, to be published by Sceptre (UK) and Basic (US) in 2023.
Jeffrey R. Wilson
Faculty member in the Writing Program at Harvard University
Jeffrey R. Wilson is a faculty member in the Writing Program at Harvard University, where he teaches the Why Shakespeare? section of the University's first-year writing course. His first book, Shakespeare and Trump, is available from Temple University Press; Shakespeare and Game of Thrones is forthcoming from Routledge. Focused on intersections of Renaissance literature and modern sociology, his work has appeared in academic journals such as Modern Language Quarterly, Genre, College Literature, Shakespeare, Mediaeval and Renaissance Drama in England, Law and the Humanities, Disability Studies Quarterly, Early Modern Literary Studies, Literary Imagination, and Crime, Media, Culture. His work has also been featured in public venues such as National Public Radio, The Chronicle of Higher Education, MLA’s Profession, New York Daily News, MarketWatch, Literary Hub, Academe, Public Seminar, The Smart Set, The Spectator USA, CounterPunch, and Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Irvine. On Twitter @DrJeffreyWilson.