Associate Professor (Reader)

Email: p dot prescott at warwick dot ac dot uk

H5.14
Humanities Building, University Road
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL

About

Dr Paul Prescott is Associate Professor (Reader), and teaches on the English and Comparative Literary Studies program. He joined the department in September 2005 as the CAPITAL Centre Lecturer in English and has taught and acted Shakespeare in the UK, Japan, China, Cuba, Australia and North America. He is active in script adaptation for professional Shakespeare productions; in 2018 he has adapted the text for productions such as The Merry Wives of Windsor (Illinois Shakespeare Festival, summer 2018), Othello (Montana Shakespeare in the Parks, summer 2018) and for the National Theatre's 2018-19 production of Macbeth, directed by Rufus Norris and starring Anne-Marie Duff and Rory Kinnear (Olivier Theatre and UK tour).

Research interests

My main research interests lie in Shakespeare in performance, Applied Shakespeare, eco-Shakespeare, theatre history, the theory and practice of arts criticism, festival culture, and schools and undergraduate pedagogy.

Current projects

I am currently working on a range of projects relating to Shakespeare festivals and Shakespeare in Performance around the world. One of these projects, Shakespeare on the Road, is a collaboration with Paul Edmondson (Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) and AJ and Melissa Leon (Misfit-Inc); our team marked the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth by touring fourteen North American Shakespeare festivals in 60 days over the summer of 2014 (www.ShakespeareontheRoad.com). A key aim of the project was to build an oral history of the festivals and the trip was the subject of a two-hour programme on Classic FM, presented by Maxine Peake and broadcast on July 4th 2016.

I have recently adapted The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, Macbeth and Othello for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks - the productions toured five states and played in over 60 communities in the summers of 2015-18. In April 2017, Shakespeare in Yosemite, a collage piece which combined passages from the works of Shakespeare and John Muir relating to nature and the environment, played in Yosemite National Park, California. Eco-inflected adaptations of A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It played to large audiences in Yosemite in April 2018 and 2019. Love's Labour's Lost will play in April 2020.

Forthcoming international collaborative projects include 'Macbeth in European Culture' (co-investigators: Juan Cerda (Murcia) and Maurizio Calbi (Palermo) and 'Cymbeline in the Anthropocene' (multiple investigators, project lead Randall Martin (New Brunswick).

Teaching and supervision

My core teaching generally takes place in 'hybrid' sessions in EN301: Shakespeare and Selected Dramatists of His Time and EN302: European Theatre, as well as more specialised modules such as the EN9A7 Drama and Performance Theory MA module and IL021 Local and Global Shakespeares, co-taught with colleagues and students at Monash University, Melbourne.

In recent years, I have taught on the Global Shakespeare core MA, on my own MA module, EN9A8 Reviewing Shakespeare, and have contributed sessions to IB3H50 Images of Creativity (in Warwick Business School), Academic Writing for the Media (an IATL interdisciplinary module) and TH320 Intercultural Theatre Practices (Theatre Studies). In future years, I hope to re-run some of the modules I've created since joining Warwick: EN327: Shakespeare and the Director; EN337: Shakespeare, from Page to Stage to Page; and EN272: The Faust Project (Interdisciplinary and Creative Collaboration; The Faust Project was developed as part of a two-year Academic Fellowship in the Reinvention Centre).

2010: Commendation in the Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence

2018: Winner of the Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence

Selected publications

• Arden Performance Editions: Othello. Editor. Bloomsbury, 2018.
• Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year, edited with Erin Sullivan. Co-author of Introduction and solo author of chapter 'Shakespeare and the Dream of Olympism'. Bloomsbury, 2015.
• Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Performance from the eighteenth century to the present. Cambridge University Press, October 2013.
• A Year of Shakespeare: Reliving the World Shakespeare Festival (editor with Paul Edmondson and Erin Sullivan; introductory essay on history of theatre criticism; reviews of Macbeth and Troilus and Cressida). Bloomsbury, 2013.
• 'Sam Wanamaker' (c.25,000 words) in Great Shakespeareans Volume 15: Poel, Granville Barker, Guthrie, Wanamaker, ed. Cary Mazer. Continuum/Bloomsbury, October 2013.

Professional associations

• Trustee of the British Shakespeare Association - Nb. membership is free for teachers