General

PhD, MA (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham), BA (Oxford). I joined the department in September 2005 as the CAPITAL Centre Lecturer in English and have taught and acted Shakespeare in the UK, Japan, China, Australia and North America. Since 2003, I have been an Associate Artist (actor-director) with the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival, Florida; I am also Editor of Performance Criticism for the Internet Shakespeare Editions website (www.ise.uvic.ca) and a Trustee of the British Shakespeare Association. I am currently Academic Associate on Teaching Shakespeare, a unique new collaboration between Warwick and the Royal Shakespeare Company which will offer online and residential qualifications and courses to teachers of Shakespeare whatever their context and wherever their location. We will admit our first cohort of distance learners in 2012 and our ambition is to transform the Shakespearean learning experiences of young people in the UK and across the world. See here for more info.

From July 2011: Admissions Tutor for the department's undergraduate degrees in English (Q300) and English and Theatre (QW34). See here for information on How to Apply

Research interests  

My research interests lie in Shakespeare in performance, theatre history, the theory and practice of arts criticism, and schools and undergraduate pedagogy. I am currently working on several articles and two monographs, the latter both relating to the history and future of Shakespearean reviewing. Together with Peter J. Smith and Paul Edmondson, I have co-edited a special edition of the journal Shakespeare (Routledge) on British theatre reviewing and proceeding from a recent conference (Reviewing Shakespearean Theatre: The State of the Art; for information and podcasts click HERE ). Forthcoming work includes a special edition of Cahiers Élisabéthains devoted to global perspectives on theatre reviewing, a mini-biography (30,000 words) of Sam Wanamaker, founder of Shakespeare's Globe, and chapters on the dramaturgy of Shakespeare's endings, and (with Nick Monk and Jonny Heron) on practical approaches to teaching The Changeling by Thomas Middleton. Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Performance from the Eighteenth Century to the Present will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2013.

Erin Sullivan (Shakespeare Institute) and I have also just launched an AHRC-funded project that seeks to gather and analyse audience and community responses to the World Shakespeare Festival and other Shakespeare-related events in the Cultural Olymiad.

  YEAR OF SHAKESPEARE.COM 

Selected publications

'Shakespeare and Popular Culture' in The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (eds. Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells: 2010)

Shakespeare Handbooks: Richard III (Palgrave-Macmillan, general ed. John Russell Brown; 2006)

Introduction to Coriolanus, New Penguin Shakespeare (revised edition, 2005)

Teaching and supervision

In 2011-12 I will be teaching 'hybrid' sessions in EN301: Shakespeare and Selected Dramatists of His Time. 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 theReinvention Centre.)

In Spring 2010 I was awarded a Commendation in the Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence.

Associate Professor and Tutor for Undergraduate Admissions

H514; email: p.prescott@warwick.ac.uk