Professor Michael Dobson

BA, MA, PhD

020 7631 6164
m.dobson@bbk.ac.uk

Michael Dobson, Professor of Shakespeare Studies, has worked extensively in universities in Britain and the United States, and has held visiting fellowships in the US and in China. He comments regularly on Shakespearean performance and criticism for the London Review of Books and the BBC, and has contributed programme notes for the RSC, Peter Stein, the Sheffield Crucible, and Shakespeare’s Globe. As well as pursuing interests in textual, historical and biographical matters, his work on Shakespeare is particularly concerned with the stage and critical history of the canon from the Renaissance to the present.  His publications include Performing Shakespeare's Tragedies Today: The Actors' Perspective(2006), The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 (1992), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (with Stanley Wells, 2001), and England's Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (with Nicola Watson, 2002), as well as many articles and book chapters. He is co-editor of the Palgrave Shakespeare Studies monograph series, serves on the editorial boards of Shakespeare Survey and Shakespeare Quarterly, and is a founder member of the European Shakespeare Research Association. 

    Beyond Shakespeare, he has edited for Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford, 2007), and he also has research interests in the Restoration, eighteenth-century and Victorian English theatre, the cultural history of nostalgia for the English Renaissance, the history of the West End, and the development of English opera. He teaches within both the English and Theatre Studies programmes at Birkbeck, and welcomes proposals for doctoral research in any of the fields in which he is active.