Dr Will Sharpe BA MA PhD FHEA

• MA Shakespeare Studies (University of Birmingham)
• PhD  (University of Birmingham)
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

After my PhD (2009) I held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Warwick (AHRC-funded) and the University of Leeds (Mellon Foundation), working on William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays (RSC/Palgrave, 2013) and The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (CUP, 2012) respectively.

I joined the University as a fixed-term Teaching Fellow in September 2014, becoming permanent in 2017. Prior to coming to Birmingham, I taught at the University of Warwick, Nottingham Trent University, and the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute as a Visiting Lecturer.

I mostly teach early modern literature (1500-1700), with a particular focus on Shakespeare.

I convene the second-year undergraduate modules ‘Shakespeare: Elizabethan' and 'Shakespeare: Jacobean’, and the third-year special option module ‘Shakespeare’s Tragedies’.

I was the recipient of the University’s Engaging Teacher Award for 2025-26.

I have co-supervised an M4C-funded PhD at the Shakespeare Institute on Thomas Middleton’s adaptations of Shakespeare (2021), and an M4C-funded PhD in collaboration with Birmingham City University on metallurgical metaphors in Shakespeare’s language.

Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My research interests are in sixteenth and seventeenth-century drama and poetry, especially Shakespeare; text and bibliography with especial emphasis on the critical editing of Renaissance drama and the history of Shakespearean editing; history of the book and print culture; authorship and collaboration in Renaissance drama, including formalist and quantitative appraisals of authorial style; Shakespeare in performance, both modern and historical.

In addition to the publications listed below, I am currently working on an edition of Henry VI Part 3 for the Arden 4 Shakespeare series.

Selected conference papers and plenaries

• Editing Shakespeare’s Revision of Marlowe in Henry VI Part 3, Marlowe Society of America Conference, July 2024.
• Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing, invited plenary at the Shakespeare Association of Korea conference, April 2024.
• Shakespeare and ‘Shakespeare as Reviser of Marlowe in Henry VI Part 3’, Shakespeare Institute Thursday Seminar series, October 2023.
• Shakespeare and the Culture of Collaboration, Shakespeare Institute Thursday Seminar series, March 2019.
• Invited speaker to The University of Melbourne's event Beyond 400: New Shakespeares (fully funded), November 2016.
• Invited speaker to the Stratford, Ontario Shakespeare Festival (fully funded). Lectured on the William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays volume with Professor Eric Rasmussen, August 2014.
• Plenary session on William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays with Dr Pete Kirwan (University of Nottingham), British Graduate Shakespeare Conference, Shakespeare Institute, June 2014.
• ‘Canon, Chronology and Collaboration in Shakespeare’s Early Career’. Invited participant alongside John Jowett, Gary Taylor, MacD. Jackson and others in ‘Early Shakespeare’ seminar, Shakespeare 450 Conference, Société Française, Paris, April 2014.
• ‘Shakespeare, Authorship, and Emotionality in the Hand D section of Sir Thomas More’, University of Queensland, Centre for the History of Emotions, 2013.
• ‘The Influence of Anxiety(?): Thoughts on the Supposed 'Crisis in Editing' and the use of Editions in Pedagogical Practice’, British Shakespeare Association Conference, Lancaster, 2012.
• ‘A Geography of History: Considering the Roles of Place and Distance within Politics and ‘History’ in 2 Henry IV’, Henry IV Part 2 seminar, Shakespeare Association of America Annual Conference, Seattle, 2011.

Selected activities

• General Editor, Digital Renaissance Editions, with Brett Hirsch (University of Western Australia), Eleanor Lowe (Oxford Brookes) and Dr Sarah Neville (University of West Virginia). Online edition and platform hosted by University of Western Australia and University of Victoria. 
• Co-Founder and Trustee of the Lizz Ketterer Trust and Ketterer’s Men – registered charity established in memory of Dr Lizz Ketterer, fundraising activities support yearly scholarship for a student from The Winedale Shakespeare Programme in Texas to attend the RSC Summer School at the Shakespeare Institute. In 2013-14 I directed and performed in a production of Pericles as a fundraiser. 

Memberships

• British Shakespeare Association
• Shakespeare Association of America
• Malone Society
• World Shakespeare Congress (WSC)

Links

• Academia.edu profile
• Selected writings and reviews