News

A previously unknown miniature portrait of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton – Shakespeare’s patron and possible lover – has been discovered in a private collection.

The owners contacted art historian Dr Elizabeth Goldring, honorary reader at the University of Warwick, after reading her book Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist, as they suspected the tiny portrait in their collection might be the work of the renowned miniaturist, and also wished to identify the sitter.

The painting has now been confirmed as a work by Nicholas Hilliard (c.1547-1619), Queen Elizabeth I’s favourite portraitist, with the subject identified as Henry Wriothesley (1573-1624). The miniature’s style indicates it was painted in the early 1590s.

“The Earl’s pearl earring, bracelets, beautifully embroidered clothing and long hair held close to his heart may present an initial impression of a woman, but this is a faithful representation of Wriothesley’s appearance,” explains Dr Goldring. “A noted patron of the arts, Wriothesley was celebrated by his contemporaries for his androgynous beauty and his love of poetry and drama. He was known, too, for his vanity and for the great pride he took in his appearance, especially his long hair.”

Shakespeare dedicated two lengthy erotic poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, to the Earl of Southampton, and Wriothesley has long been conjectured to be the beautiful, androgynous ‘fair youth’ to whom many of Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed, with some scholars suggesting that the youth was Shakespeare’s lover. Intriguingly, a small but significant detail on the reverse of this miniature offers a fascinating potential clue to the nature of Wriothesley’s personal relationship with Shakespeare.

“Miniatures were inherently private artworks that were frequently exchanged as love tokens,” said Dr Goldring. “This miniature is pasted onto a playing card, which is customary for the time. The reverse of this playing card was originally a red heart, but most unusually, the heart has been deliberately obliterated and painted over with a black arrow. It could, arguably, be a spade - but I think it more strongly resembles a spear, the symbol that appears in Shakespeare’s coat of arms.

“It’s impossible to say when this deliberate defacement took place, but it was certainly done with a purpose. One tantalising interpretation might be that Shakespeare was the original recipient of the miniature but returned it to the Earl at some point - perhaps around the time of Southampton’s marriage in 1598 - with his personal mark firmly obscuring the heart. Such a scenario would help to explain why and how the miniature remained in a branch of the Southampton family for hundreds of years.”

Dr Goldring, in partnership with art historian Emma Rutherford and literary scholar Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, has spent the last 8 months authenticating and researching the exquisite oval artwork, measuring just two and a quarter inches in height.

The discovery of the miniature adds a striking new dimension to the mystery of Shakespeare’s muse – and sheds fresh light on one of the most enigmatic relationships in literary history.

Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick are delighted to be partnering with the Pod on a new collaborative research project: ‘Using Film to Affect Change: Mental Health, Social Advocacy and the Moving Image’.

Former PhD student at Warwick, Alessandra Tafaro is pleased to announce the publication of her monograph, derived from her PhD.

The University of Warwick, in collaboration with the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, invites applications for a fully funded 3.5-year PhD studentship to explore co-creation in civic theatre. The project investigates how co-creation, as an emergent method and process, seeks to build reciprocal partnerships between arts workers and local communities for the purpose of promoting social justice and challenging notions of who has knowledge, expertise, and the right to be seen and heard in cultural organisations.

The Belgrade has placed co-creation at the heart of its role as a civic theatre, with an ambitious aim to "make the local community part of every show at the Belgrade." Spotlighting four productions—Big Aunty (2023), I, Daniel Blake (2023), Romeo and Juliet (2025), and Nanny of the Maroons (2027)—the project will discover how this commitment to co-creation shapes the values that drive the theatre's culture. It will particularly address Nanny of the Maroons, a retelling of Jamaican revolutionary leader Queen Nanny's history involving over 1,000 community participants drawn from the West Midlands Black Creative Network, Coventry Caribbean Centre, and other local groups. Employing mixed methodologies such as participant observation, interviews, and surveys, the project will ask: What does co-creation mean for artists, participants, audiences, and locals? How can co-creation offer alternatives to models in which creative professionals exclude or exploit the local communities in which civic theatres are embedded? What challenges and learnings arise from co-creation, and how might the Belgrade's experience inform wider arts policy and practice?

The student will be supervised by Dr Matthew Franks (English and Comparative Literary Studies) and Professor Nadine Holdsworth (Theatre and Performance Studies), and benefit from integrated support within Warwick's arts and humanities research environment and the Belgrade's professional networks, including Creative Director Corey Campbell and other staff members. The student will be able to determine whether to receive their doctorate from the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies or the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies.

The exhibition 'Above and Below the Line: Women's Labour in Italian Cinema' opens this week at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna. It is one of several outputs of the AHRC research project 'Women in Italian Film Production' of which Warwick FTV's Stephen Gundle is the principal investigator. Project partner the Cineteca di Bologna is hosting a digital archive containing the papers of three key women, 38 oral interviews and other resources that has been produced by the project. The archive will be inaugurated at the Cinema Ritrovato this week. .

We are pleased to announce that Dr Doina Anca Cretu, Assistant Professor in Modern European History, has been awarded the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant to work on her second project "Central Europe and the Making of the Modern Refugee Camp."

Dr Cretu will carry out archival work in Prague, Vienna, Krakow, and Warsaw.

Autumn School for Postgraduate Students and Early Career Researchers

Venice, 30 September – 4 October 2024

Our 50th anniversary celebrations have featured in a BBC news article and audio clip. See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2xd2zjgv2o

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0lg3m48

An exciting new initiative facilitated by a SCFS academic is aiming to reshape how environmental science careers are imagined and pursued.

Read more.

Our Liberal Arts programme has been recognised as the leading Liberal Arts course in the UK by the Times and Sunday Times UK University Rankings 2026. The University of Warwick has also placed 8th overall for the Best UK University.

Read more.

We are excited to announce the return of the Spooky History Conference for 2025.

We invite abstracts for 15-minute papers on any aspect of history (broadly defined) that is spooky! This can include studies on the supernatural, witchcraft, magic, the gothic, or Halloween, as long as it is spooky!

Suggested topics include but are not limited to:

• · ghosts
• · the supernatural
• · witches
• · death
• · the gothic
• · the history of Halloween

We strongly encourage submissions from PGRs, ECRs, and independent researchers.
This informal conference will be entirely online on Halloween!

All papers should be c.15 mins and we invite submissions from individuals (200 words) as well as panel proposals of 3-4 speakers (600 words). Please submit your abstracts along with a short biography to spookyhistory23@gmail.com by Friday the 3rd of October 2025.

The conference will be held online via Zoom on Friday the 31st of October 2025.

All the best,

The Spooky History Team

The University of Warwick and the University of Leeds have together secured one of only 10 prestigious Doctoral Focal Awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The Award will fund 20 PhD scholarships focused on the creative economy, with a specific emphasis on sustainability and diversity in the screen industries.

Led at Warwick by Dr David Wright, Director of Graduate Studies in the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies with Dr Sanjay Sharma (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies) and overall by Professor Joanne Garde-Hansen, Head of the School of Media and Communication with Professor Anamik Saha (Professor of Race and Media) at Leeds, the Creative Bridges partnership will run from 2026 until 2033. It will train a new generation of interdisciplinary researcher-practitioners to work alongside – and within – the film, television, games and immersive media sectors.

The Renaissance Centre's Honorary Reader, Dr Elizabeth Goldring, uncovers lost portrait of Henry Wriothesley, Shakespeare’s patron and possible lover.

During a year of research leave, Prof. Beat Kümin has investigated the phenomenon of depositing chronicles and objects into tower spheres on top of prominent buildings like churches, town halls and fortifications. Documented from the Middle Ages to the present, seemingly only in and around territories of the erstwhile Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, the custom provides fascinating insights into how local societies saw themselves and what they wished to pass on to successive generations. The project, supported by the German Gerda Henkel Foundation, has so far identified over 1600 sites and thousands of separate deposits (at one Zurich church, there were no fewer than 20 between 1505 and 1996). The funder has just released a video series of six episodes (accessible in both English and German) documenting field work in Switzerland in autumn 2003.

[English Trailer] [Episodes] [Project Homepage]

On 21-22 July, three scholars from Monash University visited the University of Warwick as part of their ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration, “Islands and Empires: Island Agency in Inter-Imperial Ordering.” The project is supported by the Monash Warwick Alliance.

The project seeks to better understand diverse manifestations of empire and their effects on island populations. Recently, scholars have dedicated attention to the relationship between islands and empire in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, as well as the Caribbean Sea. Islands feature in accounts of strategic competition, and of how international law was hashed out among imperial interests. Several studies have pointed to the agency of island polities in these rivalries.

Carlos Cámara-Menoyo, Fangzhou Zhang (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies) and Nathaniel Tkacz (Goldsmiths, University of London), have coauthored a new article "Eventful migration: Rethinking social media migration with help from Elon Musk’s sink".

Based on an extensive literature review on social media migration, and empirical data drawing on a survey of Mastodon users after the Twitter's acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022, and social media analysis, the authors propose a new theory of eventful migration. This eventful migration theory widens the conceptual scope for how to approach SocialMedia Migration in ways that more directly tie such movements to specific questions of power, agency and events that ripple through digital cultures. They do so by shifting from pull-push factors to eventfulness, which they divide into five components: (1) X factor; (2) critical voice; (3) collective platform consciousness; (4) migration; and (5) terrain transformation.