About

Our Staff

Paul Edmondson
Paul Edmondson is General Editor of Blogging Shakespeare. He is Head of Research and Knowledge and Director of the Stratford-upon-Avon Poetry Festival for The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. He is a trustee of The Rose Theatre Trust, co-series editor for Palgrave Macmillan’s Shakespeare Handbooks, and co-supervisory editor of the Penguin Shakespeare (for which he has contributed to several introductions). He is Chair of The Hosking Houses Trust. His publications include: Twelfth Night: A Guide to the Text and Its Theatrical Life, and (co-authored with Stanley Wells), Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Coffee with Shakespeare. He has published on Shakespeare’s influence on the Brontes (Bronte Studies and Shakespeare Survey). He contributed an essay on the poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare for The Cambridge History of English Poetry (May, 2010), and has two essays on Harriet Walter appearing in Actors’ Shakespeare (Routledge, 2011) and The Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia. He wrote the script for The Shakespeare Centre’s ‘Life, Love, and Legacy’ exhibition and co-curated ‘Shakespeare Found: A Life Portrait’. He took another B.A. in Applied Theological Studies (University of Birmingham), 2007-2010. He is a priest in The Church of England. Follow Paul on Twitter
@paul_edmondson

Elizabeth Woledge
Dr. Elizabeth Woledge is Outreach and Informal Learning Development Manager at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. After completing my PhD (on modern women writers and their representation of friendship between men) in 2005, I began my teaching career working for Manchester Met., Liverpool and Chester Universities. I taught a variety of modules from the Romantic Poets to Science Fiction, I was not particularly fussy what I taught I considered it was all good experience. I enjoyed trying to create thought provoking and inspiring seminars and according to my students I often succeeded. I have, like most scholars, written some journal articles and spoken at conferences but as my own academic work has not focused on Shakespeare you will have to do some snooping to find out more about that. Looking for a full time teaching post I applied for this job after seeing an advert in a discarded newspaper on an underground train. The thing I enjoy most about working for the Shakespeare birthplace trust is the diversity of the things I get involved with. From writing text for the guide book, to creating ‘guide books’ for children and helping to create exhibitions as well as lots and lots of teaching. The teaching here is particularly enjoyable because of the range of people I work with. From 13 year olds from Birmingham to post graduates from Germany ? I believe everyone has something unique to say about Shakespeare.

Nick Walton
Dr Nick Walton is Shakespeare Courses Development Manager at The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. He obtained his MA and PhD from the Shakespeare Institute, and has taught at the University of Warwick. As Executive Secretary to the International Shakespeare Association he helped organise the Eighth World Shakespeare Congress in Brisbane, Australia in 2006, and is currently working toward the 2011 Congress to be held in Prague. He regularly reviews Shakespearian productions, and he has written introductory material for the Penguin editions of Timon of Athens and Love’s Labour’s Lost, as well as contributing a chapter on Glen Byam Shaw to the book Director’s Shakespeare. In 2009 Nick recorded a stage history for the BBC’s website based around the RSC’s production of Hamlet starring David Tennant, and in 2010 he was invited to Boston to deliver lectures and talkbacks to run alongside the Actors’ Shakespeare Project production of Timon of Athens.

Stanley Wells
Stanley Wells is Honorary President and a Life Trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies of the University of Birmingham, Honorary Emeritus Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. His books include Literature and Drama; Royal Shakespeare: Studies of Four Major Productions at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre; Modernizing Shakespeare’s spelling; Re-editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader; and Shakespeare: the Poet and his Plays. He edited A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, and The Comedy of Errors for the New Penguin Shakespeare and King Lear for the Oxford Shakespeare. He was for nearly twenty years the editor of the annual Shakespeare Survey, and writes for the TLS and other publications. He has edited The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies and is General Editor (with Gary Taylor) of The Complete Oxford Shakespeare and co-author of William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. His most recent books are Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism; The Oxford Dictionary of Shakespeare: The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (edited with Michael Dobson); Shakespeare For All Time; Looking for Sex in Shakespeare; Shakespeare & Co., and Is It True What they Say About Shakespeare? He is co-author (with Paul Edmondson) of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Coffee with Shakespeare. His new book, Shakespeare Sex and Love, is due to appear from Oxford University Press in May. He was awarded a CBE in 2007 for services to literature. Follow Stanley on Twitter @stanley_wells

Regular Contributors

United States

Jay L Halio
Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Delaware, where he has taught since 1968. Before that he taught at the University of California, Davis. He is the author or editor of about 40 books on Shakespeare and on modern literature as well as many articles and reviews. He has written guides to King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice – among many others.

France

Janice Valls-Russell
Janice Valls-Russell, who holds a doctorate on Pyramus and Thisbe in English Literature (Chaucer to Cowley), is a research assistant employed by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-classical Age and the Enlightenment (IRCL), at Universite Paul Valery, Montpellier (France).
She is Reviews and Managing Editor of Cahiers Elisabethains and co-edited (with Peter J. Smith and Kath Bradley) the Complete Works Special Issue of Cahiers (2007). She is a member of the editorial board of a new electronic project, A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology

United Kingdom

Andrew Cowie
Andrew Cowie took his first degree in English and Philosophy at Lancaster University and his Masters in Drama and Theatre Education at Warwick University. He is an actor, director and playwright and his play, My Life In Art, was Time Out Critics’ Choice and has been translated into several languages including Finnish and Greek. Andrew works mainly as a freelance drama workshop facilitator in primary, secondary and tertiary education.

Stuart Hampton-reeves
Is the chair of the Board of Trustees of the British Shakespeare Association and Professor of Research-informed Teaching at the University of Central Lancashire. He writes about Shakespeare in performance and has written performance histories of the Henry VI plays (with Carol Rutter), Othello and Measure for Measure.

Pete Kirwan
Peter Kirwan is Teaching Associate in Shakespeare at the University of Nottingham. His main research is on plays of disputed Shakespearean authorship, and he has published on early book history and contemporary performance of early modern plays. He reviews theatre on his website The Bardathon (http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/pkirwan) and is currently preparing an edited collection on Shakespeare and the Digital. He is a Trustee of the British Shakespeare Association. Follow Peter on Twitter at @DrPeteKirwan.

Matt Kubus
Matt Kubus is a doctoral researcher and tutor at The Shakespeare Institute, specialising in dramatic bibliography and the textual editing of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama. He is an active member of the SBT’s authorship campaign with a forthcoming chapter in the Cambridge University Press volume on Shakespeare Authorship co-edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells.

Hans Jansen
Hans Jansen is a lecturer at the English Department of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Although his PhD was on medieval English love lyrics, his interests in drama have turned him into an amateur actor and director, and a regular pre-performance lecturer on English drama in theatres in the north of the Netherlands. He has been associated with the Shakespeare Theatre in Diever since 2007.

Italy

Shaul Bassi
Shaul Bassi is associate professor of English literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research, teaching and publications are divided between Shakespeare, postcolonial literature (with a focus on India) and Jewish studies. He is the director of the Venice international literary festival Incroci di civilta and co-founder of The Venice Center of International Jewish Studies. He has lectured at several Italian and international universities (London, Munich,Valencia, Berkeley, Toronto, Atlanta, Dubrovnik, New York, Santa Cruz, Beer Sheva, Prague) and at the Globe Theatre in London. He organized the international conferences Paper Bullets of the Brain. Experiments with Shakespeare (Venice, 2005) and Shakespeare in Venice. New Perspectives (with Laura Tosi and Patrick Spottiswoode, Venice, 2007). His Shakespearean publications include Le metamorfosi di Otello. Storia di un’etnicita immaginaria (2000), an annotated critical edition of Otello (translated by Alessandro Serpieri, 2010), the edited volume Visions of Venice in Shakespeare (co-editor Laura Tosi, 2011), and various essays. He is currently at work on an expanded edition of the guide Shakespeare in Venice. Exploring the City with Shylock and Othello (with Alberto Toso Fei, 2007).