Biography
I won the James Elliott prize for my 1994 first-class degree from the University of Edinburgh, where I was also awarded a medal in aesthetics and a number of other prizes. I took my AHRB-funded PhD from the University of St Andrews in 1998, and from 1998-9 I was the Caroline Spurgeon Research Fellow at Royal Holloway. I was Lecturer in English at the Queen's University of Belfast from 1999-2003, and returned to Royal Holloway as a Lecturer in Shakespeare in January 2003. In 2004, I was selected by Gary Taylor and the Hudson Strode Program of the University of Alabama as ‘one of the six most brilliant scholars of Renaissance drama in the world under 40’. I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2005 and Reader in 2007 before taking up my Chair at the Shakespeare Institute in January 2011.
Teaching
All my teaching is informed by a desire to vivify, explore and extend literary experience and, increasingly, to unlock the potential for creativity in Shakespeare and other historical literature. I teach on the undergraduate Shakespeare course at Birmingham, and on various postgraduate programmes at the Institute.
Postgraduate supervision
I have supervised PhDs on a range of subjects from Shakespearean narcissism and existentialism to Stephen Greenblatt and the subjectivity of criticism. I presently have students working on Shakespeare and the American imagination, Shakespeare and the Qur’an, androgyny in Renaissance drama, and undressing in early modern literature and culture.
I would be particularly pleased to hear from students interested in working with me on literature and religion or philosophy, literature and creativity or on how Shakespeare may be read in conjunction with great European and/or Russian traditions.
Research
I am the author of Shame in Shakespeare, editor of Spiritual Shakespeares and Co-ordinating Editor of Reconceiving the Renaissance. I have recently completed a novel called Dunsinane with Simon Palfrey, with whom I am also General Editor of the ‘Shakespeare Now!’ series of short, provocative books published by Continuum.
I am currently writing a critical book for Routledge on the demonic from Shakespeare to Thomas Mann which is a sort of existential essay. It links demonic to psychological, sexual and more positive religious experience and seeks a more experientially honest and intense way of doing and writing criticism.
I am Principal Investigator of the AHRC / ESRC funded project,‘The Faerie Queene Now: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today’s World', for which I’ve written the new poetic liturgyRedcrosse with the poets Andrew Motion, Michael Symmons Roberts and Jo Shapcott, and the theologian Andrew Shanks. In the course of 2011, Redcrosse has been premiered in St George’s Chapel Windsor, as part of the Windsor Spring Festival, and at Manchester Cathedral. It also featured at an associated Spenser event sponsored by the Poet in the City charity at the major London arts venue, King’s Place. The Faerie Queene Now is funded by the AHRC / ESRC Religion and Society programme. Redcrosse is additionally supported by grants from the Arts Council, the PRS Foundation for Music, LCACE, Awards for All and the Church Urban Fund, which has enabled the commission not only of new music from composer Tim Garland to be performed by jazz trio Acoustic Triangle and the Royal Holloway College Choir, but also Catalan-style giant puppets, which played a part in the Manchester event. It is hoped that Redcrosse, which has attracted a lot of media attention, might ultimately become an alternative ritual for St George’s Day. It has been adopted by the RSC for performance in Coventry Cathedral during 2012.
I have future plans for a book called Shakespearience which will share, test and explore the experience of reading Shakespeare from a frankly personal point of view, and for a variety of creative projects sourced in or returning to such literary experience. I also wish to do more work where literature and liturgy meet, following on from The Faerie Queene project.
Transcript
Other activities
Conferences / Cultural Engagement
I am a regular speaker and reader (from my creative writing) at national and international venues in Britain, Europe and America. 2011’s engagements include Cumberland Lodge, the University of Verona, The World Shakespeare Congress in Prague, the University of Sydney and a plenary at the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association conference in Auckland, New Zealand. In addition, there are The Faerie Queene events advertised here:
http://www.rhul.ac.uk/english/faeriequeene/events.html
In 2012 I'm speaking in Boston at the Shakespeare Association of America's annual meeting on 'Shakespeare and "the Penalty of Adam"'.
My creative and cultural engagement activities continue with Redcrosse and beyond. I sit on the University Cultural Engagement Committee, and the RSC's Committee for the big Shakespeare anniversary in 2016. I've also written a new poem for the celebrated choir Ex Cathedra's Candlelight concerts in Birmingham, London and elsewhere:
http://www.excathedra.co.uk/concert_diary.php?submenuheader=1
Publications
Shame in Shakespeare (Routledge, 2002) ISBN Hb: 0415258278; Pb: 01415258286
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Startlingly fresh and well-written analyses… Fernie’s analysis turns Othello into an extravagant, shame-filled house of horrors, out of which steps, briefly, a revitalized, renewed, even self-recreated version of the grand protagonist.
Shakespeare Bulletin
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(as editor) Spiritual Shakespeares (Routledge, 2005) ISBN Hb: 0415319669; Pb:9780415319676
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The argument is a clever, contemporary, and substantial challenge to more familiar ways of treating religion in Shakespeare and early modern literature more widely…. Spiritual Shakespearesoffers a fresh and edgy perspective on the critically hot topic of religion…. [It] deserves attention not only from scholars and critics interested in Shakespeare and theory or in Shakespeare and religion, but also from professional readers looking for new approaches to Shakespeare's works.
Shakespeare Quarterly
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Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism’, Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005)
(as Co-ordinating Editor) Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader (Oxford University Press, 2006) ISBN 9780199265572
(as General Editor with Simon Palfrey) The Shakespeare Now! series, including Eric Mallin, Godless Shakespeare; Amy Scott Douglas, Shakespeare Inside; Philip Davis, Shakespeare Thinking; Douglas Bruster,To be or Not to Be; Henry Turner, Shakespeare’s Double Helix; Michael Witmore, Shakespearean Metaphysics; Lukas Erne, Shakespeare’s Modern Collaborators; Steve Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean; Philippa Kelly, The King and I; David Fuller, The Life in the Sonnets; Will McKenzie and Theodora Papadopoulou (ed.), Shakespeare and I; Graham Holderness, Nine Lives of William Shakespeare; David Schalkwyk, Hamlet’s Dreams.
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Shakespeare Now! provides a much needed alternative to what we currently regard as "Shakespearean scholarship." At a time when most writing about Shakespeare seems hobbled by an imperative to recover historical microdetail, it is especially refreshing to find a forum that does not shy away from big ideas, theoretical innovation, and creative experimentation as equally legitimate scholarly responses to the Bard.
Jonathan Gil Harris, George Washington State University
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‘Terrible Action: Recent Criticism and Questions of Agency’, Shakespeare 2 (2006)
‘Dollimore’s Challenge’, Shakespeare Studies (2007)
‘Hard-core Tragedy’, in Transhistorical Tragedy, ed. Sarah Annes Brown and Catherine Silverstone (Blackwell, 2007)
‘Action! Henry V’, in Presentist Shakespeares, ed. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes (Routledge, 2007)
‘Demonic Middleton’, Handbook of Middleton Studies ed. Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (OUP, 2011)
(with Simon Palfrey) ‘Major Excerpt from Dunsinane’, in Crrritic, ed. John Schad and Oliver Tearle (Sussex Academic Press, 2011)
‘Mea Culpa: Measure for Measure and Complicity’, in Shakespeare and I, ed. Will McKenzie and Theodora Papadopoulou (Continuum, 2011)