Ewan Fernie | |
|---|---|
 Fernie in 2015 | |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | University of Edinburgh University of St Andrews |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Literary criticism |
Ewan Fernie is a British scholar and writer. He is professor, fellow and chair of Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. [1] He is also director of the pioneering 'Everything to Everybody' Project, [2] a collaboration between the University of Birmingham and Birmingham City Council.
Fernie won the James Elliott prize for his 1994 first-class degree from the University of Edinburgh, where he was also awarded a medal in aesthetics, the Horsliehill-Scott Bursary in Philosophy and a number of other prizes. He took his PhD from the University of St Andrews and afterwards lectured at the Queen's University of Belfast and Royal Holloway before joining the Shakespeare Institute in 2011. Shortly after taking up his chair at the Shakespeare Institute, Fernie pioneered the Shakespeare and Creativity MA programme. [3] In 2005, he was named one of the world's six best Renaissance scholars under 40.
Fernie believes in the politics of culture, as evinced by his Redcrosse [4] project promoting a civic liturgy for St George's Day and his advocacy of Shakespeare as European Laureate. [5] He is centrally involved in the University of Birmingham's five-year collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company at its newly reopened studio theatre, The Other Place. [6] He also has a developing interest in the way in which an enthusiasm for Shakespeare played into the radical reformation of industrial Birmingham; and he has been a keen campaigner to save the Library of Birmingham from impending cuts. [7]
Fernie travels worldwide giving lectures at various educational institutions and events. He has been a visiting scholar at Eton College, and an International Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies, LMU, Munich; he has presented his work at the University of Verona, the Sorbonne, University College Dublin, the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, the World Shakespeare Congress, the Shakespeare Association of America, Shakespeare's Globe, the Rose Theatre, etc. Fernie was a visiting professor at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions in Australia in April 2015. [8] In 2017, he gave a keynote at the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English meeting in Neuchâtel and was a Lloyd Davis Memorial Visiting Professor at the University of Queensland. He addressed the Société Française Shakespeare in Paris in 2018.
Engagements in 2019 include addressing the Shakespeare Association of America in Washington, D.C., participation in a ‘Citizen Shakespeare’ Symposium at the University of Minnesota and a key-note address at Charles University in Prague.
Fernie's critical work is characterised by passionate intellectual engagement and the belief that art and literature can really connect with and even shape personal, political and religious life. His main area of specialism is Shakespeare but his interests extend to European writers and philosophers, among them Dostoevsky, Hegel, Mann, Nietzsche, Luther and others, as evidenced in his critically acclaimed The Demonic: Literature and Experience (2012). [9] He is also the author of Shame in Shakespeare [10] and editor of Spiritual Shakespeares. [11] With Simon Palfrey, he is editor of the Arden Shakespeare Now! [12] series of minigraphs on various urgent topics in contemporary Shakespeare studies.
Fernie believes in experimenting with and testing the possibilities of critical form. As a creative writer, he has written a novel called Macbeth, Macbeth [13] [14] with Simon Palfrey, which is based on Shakespeare's Macbeth and inspired by Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and was published in 2016. [15] He was Principal Investigator of 'The Faerie Queene Now: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today's World' and leader of 'The Faerie Queene Liturgy Project', [16] the major outcome of which was the Redcrosse liturgy [17] for contemporary England. This was performed in major cathedrals, attracted a BNP protest, and was published by Bloomsbury, before being adopted by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The project was initially funded by AHRC/ESRC and was further supported by Arts Council, LCACE, Awards for All, the PRS Foundation for Music and the Church Urban Fund. Fernie has also written poetry for the acclaimed Ex Cathedra choir's Candlelight concerts in Birmingham, London and other places.
Fernie's recent work includes a volume on Thomas Mann and Shakespeare edited with Tobias Döring, and a new play called Marina, based on Shakespeare's Pericles and written with Katharine Craik. Fernie's latest authored book is Shakespeare for Freedom: Why the Plays Matter, published by CUP in 2017. [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] He has recently published New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity, co-edited with Paul Edmondson of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
Fernie also contributed to the British Council's project 'Shakespeare Lives' in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death in 2016 [23] where he addressed large audiences especially in Belgrade and Budapest.
His major current project is an ambitious collaboration with Birmingham City Council. The 'Everything to Everybody' Project aims to use Birmingham's forgotten past to inspire our future and to unlock the world's first people's Shakespeare Library for all. Its patron is the renowned Birmingham-born-and-bred actor, Adrian Lester. [24] [25] Fernie is also Academic Director of ‘Culture Forward - University of Birmingham’, which is bringing the University into closer and more meaningful collaborations with culture in the City.
In 2024, Ewan Fernie travelled to Australia where he gave a lecture on the only First Folio in Australia and its links to Birmingham's pioneering Shakespeare culture. [26]
Professor Ewan Fernie was one of the foremost Shakespeare experts interviewed in the recent BBC programme ‘Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius’, alongside Dame Judi Dench, Professor James S. Shapiro and others.
(as General Editor, with Simon Palfrey) The Shakespeare Now! series (Arden, Bloomsbury):
Edmund Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognized as one of the premier craftsmen of nascent Modern English verse, and he is considered one of the great poets in the English language.
Macbeth is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. It is thought to have been first performed in 1606. It dramatises the damaging physical and psychological effects of political ambition on those who seek power. Of all the plays that Shakespeare wrote during the reign of James I, Macbeth most clearly reflects his relationship with King James, patron of Shakespeare's acting company. It was first published in the Folio of 1623, possibly from a prompt book, and is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy.
The Faerie Queene is an English epic poem by Edmund Spenser. Books I–III were first published in 1590, then republished in 1596 together with books IV–VI. The Faerie Queene is notable for its form: at over 36,000 lines and over 4,000 stanzas, it is one of the longest poems in the English language; it is also the work in which Spenser invented the verse form known as the Spenserian stanza. On a literal level, the poem follows several knights as a means to examine different virtues, and though the text is primarily an allegorical work, it can be read on several levels of allegory, including as praise of Queen Elizabeth I. In Spenser's "Letter of the Authors", he states that the entire epic poem is "cloudily enwrapped in Allegorical devices", and that the aim of publishing The Faerie Queene was to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline".
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is an American literary historian and author. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Sir John Frank Kermode, FBA was a British literary critic best known for his 1967 work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction and for his extensive book-reviewing and editing.
Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL, is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, scholar, and occasional novelist, playwright and poet. He specializes in Shakespeare, Romanticism and ecocriticism. He is Regents Professor of Literature and Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment in the Department of English in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the School of Sustainability in the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College in the University of Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature. Bate was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, from 2011 to 2019. From 2017 to 2019 he was Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London. He was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education. He is also Chair of the Hawthornden Foundation.
Elizabethan literature refers to bodies of work produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), and is one of the most splendid ages of English literature. In addition to drama and the theatre, it saw a flowering of poetry, with new forms like the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and dramatic blank verse, as well as prose, including historical chronicles, pamphlets, and the first English novels. Major writers include William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Hooker, Ben Jonson, Philip Sidney and Thomas Kyd.
Innogen is a character in the Historia Regum Britanniae and subsequent medieval British pseudo-history. She was said to have been a Greek princess, the daughter of King Pandrasus, and to have become Britain's first Queen consort as the wife of Brutus of Troy, the purported first king of Britain who was said to have lived around the 12th century BC. Her sons Locrinus, Camber, and Albanactus went on to rule Loegria, Cambria, and Alba respectively.
Jonathan G Dollimore is a British philosopher and critic in the fields of Renaissance literature, gender studies, queer theory, history of ideas, death studies, decadence, and cultural theory. He is the author of four academic books, a memoir, and numerous academic articles. With Alan Sinfield he was the co-editor of and key contributor to Political Shakespeare, and the co-originator of the critical practice known as cultural materialism. Dollimore is credited with making major interventions in debates on sexuality and desire, Renaissance literary culture, art and censorship, and cultural theory.
Shakespeare: The Animated Tales is a series of twelve half-hour animated television adaptations of the plays of William Shakespeare, originally broadcast on BBC2 and S4C between 1992 and 1994.
Shakespeare's Sonnet 34 is included in what is referred to as the Fair Youth sequence, and it is the second of a briefer sequence concerned with a betrayal of the poet committed by the young man, who is addressed as a personification of the sun.
David Lee Miller is a scholar of English Renaissance Literature. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. His works include The Poem's Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queen, ; Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrificial Sons and the Father's Witness ; three edited books; and about two dozen refereed articles that have appeared in scholarly journals such as Modern Language Quarterly, English Literary History, and Publications of the Modern Language Association. He is one of four general editors of The Collected Works of Edmund Spenser, a new scholarly edition under contract to Oxford University Press.
Simon Palfrey is an English Scholar at Oxford University and a Fellow in English at Brasenose College, Oxford University. He specialises in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature.
William Shakespeare's style of writing was borrowed from the conventions of the day and adapted to his needs.
Sonnet 87 is one of 154 sonnets published by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare in 1609. It is part of the Fair Youth sequence, and sometimes included as the last sonnet in the Rival Poet group.
Michael Witmore is a Shakespearean, scholar of rhetoric, digital humanist, and director of a library and cultural institution. In 2011, he was appointed the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., where he continues to serve.
The House of Pride is a notable setting in Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene. The actions of cantos IV and V in Book I take place there, and readers have associated the structure with several allegories pertinent to the poem.
Tiffany Stern is a historian and Shakespeare scholar. She is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.
Tom de Freston is a visual artist and writer based in Oxford. His work is known for his focus on images of humanity, despair, that ‘convey our most haunted fears about a world struggling for survival’. His practice is dedicated to the construction of multimedia worlds, combining paintings, film, writing and performance into immersive visceral narratives.
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