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Shakespeare Institute - University Of Birmingham
Starting at GBP 5
Thu, 19 Jun, 2025 at 09:00 am - Sat, 21 Jun, 2025 at 11:00 pm (GMT+01:00)
Shakespeare Institute - University Of Birmingham
Church Street, Stratford-upon-avon, United Kingdom
The British Graduate Shakespeare Conference (BritGrad), run by students for students, provides graduates and undergraduates from all over the world the opportunity to:
Info: Our conference begins with open remarks from our Director, Professor Micheal Dobson
Info: Join Caroline Fay Burgon for an insightful and engaging conversation with Sir Gregory Doran, acclaimed director and former Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, discussing Shakespeare’s plays and exploring how these timeless works continue to resonate with modern audiences.
Info: A workshop/roundtable discussion with three of the Combined Academic publishing houses will run alongside three panels. They are: Panel 1 - Stagecraft, Props, and Theatrical Materiality in Early Modern Drama; Panel 2 - Adaptation, and Shakespeare's Evolving Legacy; Panel 3 - Queerness, Sexuality, and Desire in Early Modern Drama
Info: Four panels are running at this time. They are: Panel 4 - Women & Female Agency in Shakespeare; Panel 5 - Identity and Otherness in Hamlet; Panel 6 - Science and Medicine in Early Modern Texts; Panel 7 - Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Approaches to Translating Shakespeare
Info: Four panels are running at this time. They are: Panel 8 - Tragedy, Tyranny, and Gender in The Winter's Tale; Panel 9 - AI, Digital Shakespeare & New Media; Panel 10 - Allegory, Morality and Symbolism in Renaissance Literature; Panel 11 - Disability and Representation of the Body
Info: Shakespeare’s plays, and most plays written for commercial acting companies of the time, were designed for the specific resources available to the particular company that was to produce them. This included not only physical resources (such as the playhouse or existing props) but also personnel. By ‘parsing’ the play into different role types, and collating those role types first with those in other plays for the same company in the same period, and with surviving empirical evidence of original casting, it is possible to deduce which actors had which roles written for them. This talk will outline some of the principles and procedures, with a brief account of two individuals, a sharer (John Heminges) and a company apprentice who later became a sharer (Richard Robinson). It will also sketch some instances where an actor-centered approach to the plays can resolve apparent issues which, in the traditional narrative-centred approach, have had to be solved by (unnecessary) textual emendation.
Info: The Lady of Chabry: A Play Reading by REP (at Mason Croft & on Zoom)
This evening’s play reading follows the morning’s plenary lecture with Dr. Martin Wiggins and Roberta Barker on their research done with Reading Early Plays (REP). This reading of an original play in style of an early modern play is an opportunity to see the meeting of research and praxis in performance. Conference attendees are welcome to sign up below to read for a part or to come along and just listen—there is no pressure to read.
Info: Not unlike auditioning for actors, writing research proposals is a crucial yet distinct part of a researcher’s craft. The frustrations are numerous: a proposal is time-intensive, speculative, and unpublishable. However, few things prove as professionally important as winning funding. In this session, I will explore strategies and timelines for pursuing post-doctoral funding in particular — but with observations that are highly applicable for doctoral and creative proposals also. Panel 13 - Shakespeare's Theatrical Devices; Panel 14 - Shakespeare, Pedagogy, and Educational Traditions
Info: The Academic Writing Advisory Service (AWAS) of the University of Birmingham is proud to showcase In Conversation, an exciting interview series where AWAS tutors sit down with researchers across the university to explore their experiences with academic writing and study skills. Now tutors and fellow PhD students, Tamara Batty and Matthew Bruce, are turning their attention not to seasoned academics, but to each other, to explicate the positives and challenges of academic writing. In Conversation has provided insightful conversations that remind us that everyone wrestles with their writing, but there are always ways to improve. What began as a project within the university’s College of Arts and Law in 2023 has now expanded university-wide, highlighting the shared challenges of academic writing of researchers; Panel 15 – Creative Rewriting of Shakespeare;
Panel 16 – Identity and Migration in Political Shakespeare;
Panel 17 – Queer Readings and Gendered Spaces in Early Modern Drama
Info: Workshop 4 - Palaeography with the Folger Shakespeare Library; Panel 18 – Performance Studies: Bodies, Space, and Staging Shakespeare; Panel 19 – Law, Land, and Power in Early Modern England; Panel 20 - Classical Reception and Cultural Influence in Early Modern Drama.
Info: In this talk, I respond to some of the challenges laid down by Alan Armstrong to critics working within a literary-critical paradigm. In his parodic “Romeo and Juliet Academic Theatre Review Kit”, Armstrong notes the limitations of reviews which (often necessarily) privilege product over process and holistic interpretation over the labour of performance. Drawing on twenty years of reviewing experience, my time as editor of Shakespeare Bulletin, and my current work utilising embedded reviewing practice in the rehearsal room, this talk reimagines Shakespeare reviewing as critical advocacy not for Shakespeare but for theatrical labour. In doing so, this paper seeks to uplift the pedagogical and professional value of training in theatre reviewing, as part of an imperative to develop empathy and shared literacy in the collective meaning-making around Shakespeare.
Info: Ruby Granger discusses how we can take a more creative and embodied approach to studying Shakespeare, rejecting the idea that academic rigour must exclude personal connection and aesthetic experience. The talk offers an experiential approach, rooted in curiosity, which can let our studies breathe. Online, Ruby Granger encourages students to use The Sawyer Effect to turn work into play, and this talk discusses how we can practically do this when studying Shakespeare. In particular, we consider how commonplacing and performance -- both central to seventeenth-century thinking and pedagogy -- can be utilised by students today. This approach is not only a way for students to understand Shakespeare’s milieu, but can also help us to reframe information and approach research with a fresh perspective. Aside from this, the talk will reflect on the often-dismissed role of aestheticism when studying, and how this can be reimagined as a productive tool. Packed with tangible advice for students!
Info: For many PGRs and ECRs, a performance review in a peer-reviewed journal is often the first piece of academic writing they have published. This workshop session, delivered by Shakespeare Bulletin’s Performance Reviews Editor, Benjamin Broadribb, and Development Editor, Nora Williams, is designed to explore and demystify the process of having a performance review published in the journal: how to make initial contact, the writing and editing process, getting the piece accepted for publication, and what support is available throughout. While the session will focus on Shakespeare Bulletin’s process for performance reviews in particular, the session’s broader aim is to support delegates in how to take their initial steps into the world of academic publishing more widely. Panel 21 - Female Representation & Emotion in Early Modern Drama; Panel 22 - Trans & Genderqueer Possibilities in Early Modern Literature; Panel 23 - Teaching Shakespeare
Info: In this workshop, Rob Myles will introduce exercises from The Shakespeare Deck, using a combination of physicalising text and long form improvisation in tandem, to help uncover new and responsive ways of seeing a familiar speech. By exploring not just the meaning, but the significance of what is said, and how, we discover opportunity areas embedded in the text that can be interpreted flexibly; Panel 24 - Food and Sex
Info: Do literary or political theories have feelings? Do researchers have an ethical responsibility to them? How would we even know? Do you have to queer-theory-proof your home? Does it need its own water bowl? Is queer theory a pet that requires a life-long commitment? Taking these playful questions as jumping-off-point, this workshop, led by Liesl Jensen, founder of the Guild of Queer Early Modernists, will try to answer these questions (and many other absurd, queer, questions) about some of the ethical conundrums that scholars of queerness in early modernity face. Together we will read excerpts from major queer scholars thinking about the politics and ethics of their work, and then have a seminar-style discussion about those texts and their approaches; Panel 25 - Performance, Space, and Theatrical Adaptation; Panel 26 - Economy, Property & Money in Shakespeare; Panel 27 - Race, Identity, and Representation
Info: This talk argues for the essentialness of paper in the long history of Shakespeare editing. There is, of course, William Prynne’s critique in the 1630s of Shakespeare’s plays being printed not only in folio but also on ‘the best Crowne paper.’ I take this early moment of readerly awareness about the convergence of Shakespearean content and paper quality as a starting point to explore how paper has factored into editorial method and vision since. Case studies include Edward Capell’s innovations with paper in his landmark but underappreciated eighteenth-century complete works, as well as various efforts to make paper mean something during the fine-printing letterpress revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (including by A. H. Bullen at his Shakespeare Head Press in Stratford).
Also check out other Arts events in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Workshops in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Theatre events in Stratford-Upon-Avon.
Tickets for British Graduate Shakespeare Conference 2025 can be booked here.
| Ticket type | Ticket price |
|---|---|
| Online 3 Day Ticket | 15 GBP |
| Online Thursday Day ticket | 5 GBP |
| Online Friday Day Ticket | 5 GBP |
| Online Saturday Day Ticket | 5 GBP |
| In Person 3 Day Ticket | 55 GBP |
| In Person Thursday Day Ticket | 25 GBP |
| In Person Friday Day Ticket | 25 GBP |
| In Person Saturday Day Ticket | 25 GBP |
We have gathered all the information for you in one convenient spot, but please keep in mind that these are subject to change.We do our best to keep everything updated, but something might be out of sync. For the latest updates, always check the official event details by clicking the "Find Tickets" button.
