Ewan Fernie is Chair, Professor and Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon.Academic staff: Professor Ewan Fernie
Fernie is a cultural commentator, political thinker and creative writer interested in the nexus between art, politics, philosophy and religion. Topics he has written about include shame, spirituality, working-class freedom movements, and the culture wars. His range of reference encompasses Martin Luther, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Hegel, as well as the connections between Shakespeare and revolution at the dawn of the modern epoch.
Fernie was the Director of the 2-million-pound Lottery-funded ‘Everything to Everybody’ ProjectEverything to Everybody Project, University of Birmingham, which revived the first great Shakespeare library in the world with people and communities across Birmingham and fed into the Opening Ceremony of the 2022 Commonwealth Games.
Having lectured and featured in print and broadcast media across the globe, Fernie was academic anchor for the BBC series Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius in 2023. He was also the main expert contributor to Channel 4's Shakespeare, My Family and Me with Judi Dench, which aired on 27 December, 2025 and New Year's Day, 2026.
He has recently begun to write for the Dublin Review of Books.
Background and career
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.MA Shakespeare and Creativity, University of Birmingham 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 RedcrosseRoyal Holloway: The Faerie Queene Liturgy Project project promoting a civic liturgy for St George's Day and his advocacy of Shakespeare as European Laureate.The Guardian: Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon Now... and Euro-Laureate Hereafter? 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.University of Birmingham: University of Birmingham announces ground-breaking collaboration with Royal Shakespeare Company 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.Shakespeare Institute Library: Professor Ewan Fernie's letter
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. 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.
Work
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).Ewan Fernie, The Demonic: Literature and Experience (Routledge, 2012) He is also the author of Shame in ShakespeareEwan Fernie, Shame in Shakespeare (Routledge, 2001) and editor of Spiritual Shakespeares.Ewan Fernie (ed.), Spiritual Shakespeares (Routledge, 2006) With Simon Palfrey, he is editor of the Arden Shakespeare Now!Shakespeare Now! series, Bloomsbury 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, MacbethMacbeth, Macbeth: a novel by Ewan Fernie and Simon PalfreyEwan Fernie on ABC: Dark Materials with Simon Palfrey, which is based on Shakespeare's Macbeth and inspired by Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and was published in 2016.HuffPost UK: Shakespeare's Timeless Tragedy Inspires a New Novel He was Principal Investigator of 'The Faerie Queene Now: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today's World' and leader of 'The Faerie Queene Liturgy Project',The Faerie Queene Now: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today’s World the major outcome of which was the Redcrosse liturgyBloomsbury Literary Studies: Ewan Fernie on The Faerie Queene Now 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.Ewan Fernie's inaugural lecture: Freetown! Shakespeare and Social FlourishingEwan Fernie on ABC: Why Shakespeare still mattersTimes Higher Education Supplement: Review of Shakespeare for Freedom by Ewan FernieShakespeare for Freedom: Why the Plays Matter - In conversation with Kiernan Ryan and Ewan FernieShakespeare for Freedom Launch Discussion 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 where he addressed large audiences especially in Belgrade and Budapest.
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.Shakespeare’s First Folio: State Library of NSW takes the Bard’s ‘radical’ 400-year-old book out of the vault, The Guardian
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.
Publications
(as co-editor with Tom Epps) Forgotten Treasures: The World’s First Great Shakespeare Library, West Midlands History Ltd (2022), (as co-editor with Paul Edmondson) New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity, The Arden Shakespeare, (2018), Shakespeare for Freedom: Why the Plays Matter, Cambridge University Press, (2017), ‘Introduction’, The Poet's Quest for God: 21st Century Poems of Faith, Doubt and Wonder, ed. Todd Swift et al., Eyewear Publishing, (2016), (as co-author with Simon Palfrey) Macbeth, Macbeth, Bloomsbury, (2016), (as co-editor with Tobias Döring) Thomas Mann and Shakespeare: Something Rich and Strange, Bloomsbury, (2015), ‘Freetown! Shakespeare and Social Flourishing’, Shakespeare Survey 68 (2015), ‘Love's Transgression’, in The Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern English Literature, ed. Sophie Chiari, Ashgate, (2015), ‘Another Golgotha’, in Shakespeare and Varieties of Early Modern Religious Belief, ed. David Loewenstein and Michael Witmore, CUP, (2014), ‘Afterword’, Revisiting The Tempest, ed. Silvia Bigliazzi and Lisanna Calvi, Palgrave, (2014), ‘Redcrosse: Storytelling, Religion and Nation in England’, in Storytelling: Critical and Creative Approaches, ed. L. E. Semler, Philippa Kelly, and Jan Shaw, Palgrave, (2014), The Demonic: Literature and Experience, Routledge, (2012), Shame in Shakespeare, Routledge, (2002), ‘Wisdom in Reverse’, in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, ed. Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley, Oxford University Press, (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), ‘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), 'Terrible Action: Recent Criticism and Questions of Agency’, Shakespeare 2 (2006), ISSN 1745-0918 (Print), ISSN 1745-0926 (Online) Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism’, Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005), (as Editor and Co-Author) Redcrosse: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today's World, Bloomsbury, (2012), (as Editor) Spiritual Shakespeares, Routledge, (2005), (as Co-ordinating Editor) Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader, Oxford University Press, (2006),
(as General Editor, with Simon Palfrey) The Shakespeare Now! series (Arden, Bloomsbury):
Shakespeare's Universality: Here's Fine Revolution, by Kiernan Ryan (2015) Tragic Cognition in Shakespeare's Othello: Beyond the Neural Sublime, by Paul Ceflau (2015) The King and I, by Philippa Kelly (2015) Nine Lives of William Shakespeare, by Graham Holderness (2013) Hamlet's Dreams, by David Schalkwyk (2013) Shakespeare and I, by William McKenzie and Theodora Papadopoulou (ed.) (2012) The Life in the Sonnets, by David Fuller (2011) At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean, by Steve Mentz (2009) Shakespearean Metaphysics, by Michael Witmore (2008) Shakespeare's Modern Collaborators, by Lukas Erne (2008) Shakespeare's Double Helix, by Henry S. Turner (2008) Shakespeare Thinking, by Philip Davis (2007) Shakespeare Inside: The Bard Behind Bars, by Amy Scott-Douglass (2007) Godless Shakespeare, by Eric Mallin (2007) To Be or Not to Be, by Douglas Bruster (2007)
References