Carol Chillington Rutter received her PhD in English from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her dissertation, Philip Henslowe and his Diary, was awarded the Horace Rackham Graduate School prize for outstanding scholarship in 1979. She was appointed to lectureships at the University of Warwick from 1980 and promoted to a personal chair, Professor of Shakespeare and Performance Studies, in 2005. She was director of the CAPITAL Centre (Creativity and Performance in Teaching and Learning) 2006-2011, a HEFCE-funded Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning that, in partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company, developed cross-faculty open-space learning for higher education. She presided over CAPITAL's transformation to IATL (Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning) in 2011. In 2007 she was awarded a Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence and in 2011 appointed a National Teaching Fellow. In 2014-2016 she participated in an international project to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the establishment of the Venetian Ghetto and the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's death with a site specific production of The Merchant of Venice in the Ghetto. In 2023 she was Visiting Fellow at Ca' Foscari, Università di Venezia.

 

Rutter is a theatre historian who specialises in performance studies, writing about Shakespeare and his contemporaries both in early modern and subsequent performances. Her books include

Documents of the Rose Playhouse (Manchester University Press, 1984; Second Edition 1999); Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare’s Women Today (The Women’s Press, 1988; reprinted 1989, 1991, 1994; Routledge, 1999]); Tony Harrison: Permanently Bard (Bloodaxe Books, 1995), winner of the Heinemann Prize, 1996; Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (Routledge, 2001); Shakespeare and Child’s Play: Performing Lost Boys on Stage and Screen (Routledge, 2007); Antony and Cleopatra in Performance (Manchester University Press, 2020). She wrote the 'Introduction' of the Penguin3 Macbeth (2005) and co-authored Henry VI in Performance, with Stuart Hampton Reeves (Manchester University Press, 2006); The Winter’s Tale: Shakespeare in Performance, with Judith Dunbar (Manchester University Press, 2011) and Open Space Learning: A Study in Transdisciplinary Pedagogy, with Nicholas Monk, Jonothan Neelands and Jonathan Heron (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011). She is the author of some fifty articles and chapters in edited books. Her current project is a biography of Henry Wotton, ambassador to the Venetian Republic in 1604. Working title: Lying Abroad: Henry Wotton and the Invention of Diplomacy.