To be a Shakespeare Institute student – whether on site or via our distance learning programmes – is to be at the centre of global networks in Shakespearean studies.
Collaboration colleagues from Waswda University and the University of Birmingham outside the Shakespeare Institute
The Institute offers an environment in which students and staff are encouraged to be creative. We want to bring the directors, actors, writers, arts administrators and teachers as well as the academics of the future to Stratford. We want to bring Shakespeare to life in new ways in the here-and-now across the world. We have extensive international collaborations with institutions such as Waseda University in Japan and Nanjing University in China as well as Shakespeare-focussed organizations across Europe and North America.
The Shakespeare Centre, China, at Nanjing
Waseda University, Tokyo
The National University of Singapore
NUS is the home of the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive, of which Professor Michael Dobson is a member of the Editorial Board and Dr Jessica Chiba a member of the editorial team. In collaboration with both NUS and A|S|I|A, the Institute now co-teaches a pioneering online MA module, ‘Performing Shakespeare in Asia,’ co-led by Professor Li Lan Yong and Professor Michael Dobson.
Nanyang University
Shakespeare Institute faculty are collaborating with Singapore-based digital animator Hans Martin Rall to produce a series of animated films and VR experiences based on Shakespeare, many of them with South-East Asian aesthetics.
The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana
Closely linked with the University of Birmingham through the ‘Second Cities’ network, UIUC is collaborating with the Shakespeare Institute on ways of digitizing Shakespearean performance. A shared roundtable discussion and workshop, involving students and faculty from both institutions, took place in autumn 2022, and further activities are planned.
The University of Verona
The Shakespeare Institute is a partner in the University of Verona’s Shakespeare and the Mediterranean Summer School and its simultaneous Verona Shakespeare Fringe Festival. All Shakespeare Institute students can enrol for the course at half the normal price.
Saheed Benazir Women’s University, Peshawar
L'Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l'âge Classique et les Lumières, Montpellier
The IRCL developed from the Renaissance Studies Institute founded at Paul Valery University in Montpellier by the late Jean-Marie Maguin, who spent a year at the Shakespeare Institute in the early 1970s and realized that France needed an equivalent. The IRCL even holds its weekly guest seminars on Thursdays in emulation of the Institute, and as of 2022 the Institute and the IRCL will now share at least one Thursday seminar per year via Zoom.
Elsewhere in France, the Institute sends two postgraduate students every spring to run two days of theatre workshops at L'Institut Catholique d'Études Supérieures (ICES, Catholic Institute of Higher Studies), in La Roche sur Yon.