Title: Introduction to the Shakespeare Institute
Duration: 2.46 mins
Welcome to the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Here at the Shakespeare Institute, we offer the immense challenge of understanding Shakespeare's works, Shakespeare's times and the impact of Shakespeare on the modern world.
We do so with a very supportive staff, with some of the best resources of any university in the UK and with a diverse community of international students.
My colleagues are experts in their fields. They do research on Shakespeare and creative practice, on Shakespeare and spirituality, on Shakespeare and education, on the performance history of Shakespeare's plays, on the history of Shakespeare's texts, on the social and theatrical context in which Shakespeare worked in the renaissance and on the material culture of Shakespeare, the objects which we can still find that he worked with in his own time.
All that expertise is there for you. And we add to it every week, with expert visiting speakers at our Thursday seminars, who come to the Institute from all over the world.
We have the best Shakespeare collection of any University in the UK. And we work with all the other research libraries in the area. So that at any moment our students can be looking at Shakespeare's will, at 18th and 19th century playbills or at Kenneth Branagh's shooting scripts.
If you add in all the electronic resources at your disposal, you will have everything that's relevant to Shakespeare for your study.
We know that you may not have the time or resources to come to for an uninterrupted year so we've organised our programmes as flexibly as we can.
You can take our courses in week-long blocks. You can take them at weekends. Or you can take them online.
Of course, you'll be supported by our staff and you'll have access to all the electronic resources at the Institute. So you can mix and match the different ways we teach to make up your degree at the Institute.
We hope you'll come and join our students soon. Not only in the courses that we offer, but in the performances in the garden or perhaps at BritGrad, the enormous conference that our students organise at the end of every academic year.
You're very welcome to come to a Thursday seminar or make an appointment to come and talk to one of our staff by emailing us in advance.