Robert Stagg

Dr. Robert Stagg is a Shakespearean and early modernist who joins Texas A&M from the Shakespeare Institute (in Stratford-upon-Avon) and the University of Oxford. From August 2024 he will be Assistant Professor of English and Director of the New Variorum Shakespeare.

His first book 'Shakespeare's Blank Verse: An Alternative History' (Oxford University Press, 2022) is the first book-length study of Shakespeare's blank verse and early modern blank verse in general, ranging from the continental precursors of English blank verse in the early sixteenth century to the reception and editing of Shakespeare's blank verse in the eighteenth century and beyond. The initial research for 'Shakespeare's Blank Verse' received the University of Oxford's Charles Oldham Shakespeare Prize, and the published book has been shortlisted for awards including the Society for Renaissance Studies Book Prize and the University English Book Prize.

Dr. Stagg has published articles on a wide range of subjects and authors in the journals 'Studies in Philology', 'The Review of English Studies', 'Shakespeare Survey' (thrice), 'Essays in Criticism', and 'Shakespeare', as well as chapters in a number of edited collections. He is also the editor of a special issue of 'Shakespeare' about 'Shakespeare and Versification', and co-author of the Oxford Bibliographies entry on 'Shakespeare's Language'.

He is now writing a book titled 'Shakespeare's Worldly Style', which rethinks scholarly descriptions of a "global Shakespeare" by considering the involvement of Shakespeare's literary-dramatic style with the world outside Europe, from North African and Middle Eastern lyric to early American writing.

Dr. Stagg has received major long-term research funding from the Leverhulme Trust and the Wolfson Foundation, as well as short-term research fellowships in libraries and institutions ranging from New York to Berlin to Tokyo. He currently serves as one of the first three Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series Fellows, and his "outstanding contributions to the field of the Renaissance" were recently recognised by the London Renaissance Seminar's Contribution Awards.

In his role as Director of the New Variorum Shakespeare at Texas A&M (https://newvariorumshakespeare.org/), Dr. Stagg looks forward to developing the NVS into one of the most exciting and indispensable research centers in digital, Shakespearean, and early modern studies.

Selected Publications: 

Books:

Shakespeare’s Blank Verse: An Alternative History (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Edited Collections:

‘Shakespeare and Versification’. Special issue of Shakespeare, 2022.

Articles:

• ‘Shakespeare’s Arabic Sonnets’. Shakespeare Survey, 2024.
• ‘Is Blank Verse Black?’. Shakespeare, 2022.
• ‘Rhyme’s Voices: Hearing Gender in The Taming of the Shrew’. Studies in Philology, 2022
• ‘Shakespeare’s Bombastic Blanks’. The Review of English Studies, 2021
• ‘Shakespeare’s Bewitching Line’. Shakespeare Survey, 2018.
• ‘Wordsworth, Pope, and Writing After Bathos’. Essays in Criticism, 2014.
  
  

Chapters:

• ‘Who speaks what when and where to whom, or, On close reading drama’, Close Reading for the 21^st Century, ed. Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant. Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2025.
• ‘Prosody’, The Oxford Handbook of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Catherine Bates. Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025.
• ‘Humoral style’, Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, ed. Kaara Peterson and Amy Kenny. Palgrave, 2021.
• ‘Against “the music of poetry”’, The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa. Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
• ‘Reading the onstage road’, Reading the Road: Shakespeare’s Crossways to Bunyan’s Highways, ed. Lisa Hopkins and William Angus. Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
  
  

Other:

• ‘Foreword’ to Richard Barnfield’s Poetics: Early Modern English Poetry Beyond Shakespeare, ed. Fabio Ciambella, Camilla Caporicci and Cristiano Ragni. Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2026.
• (with Iolanda Plescia) ‘Shakespeare’s Language’, Oxford Bibliographies, 2024.
• ‘Meter in the Middle Distance’, International Shakespeare Conference paper published in Shakespeare Survey, 2023.
• ‘Afterword’ to special issue of Skenè on ‘Well-Staged Syllables: From Classical to Early Modern Meters on Stage’, 2022.

Appointments

2024 - present: Assistant Professor of English and Director of the New Variorum Shakespeare, Texas A&M University

2022 - present: Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series Fellow

2020 - present: invited member of International Shakespeare Conference, Stratford-upon-Avon

2017 - present: Senior Member / Associate Senior Member, St Anne's College, Oxford (also, variously, Pro-Proctor, Assistant Dean, and Lecturer [Asst Prof] in English, and Chair of the Michael Dillon LGBT+ Lectures and the Oxford Renaissance Online Seminar)

2020 - 2024: Leverhulme Early-Career Research Fellow, Shakespeare Institute

2022 - 2024: Academic Deputy, Everything to Everybody Shakespeare

Research Funding and Visiting Fellowships

2024: Visiting Fellow, University of Verona

2023: Visiting Fellow, Waseda University (Tokyo). Part-funded by a separate grant from the Sasakawa Foundation.

2020 - 2024: Leverhulme Trust Early-Career Research Fellowship

2020: Visiting Fellow, 'Berlin Sessions'

2019: Pforzheimer Visiting Research Fellow, Harry Ransom Center, UT Austin

2017: Wolfson Visiting Research Fellow, New York Public Library

2017: Tom Jarman Visiting Scholar, Gladstone's Library

2015: London Film School grant to write and produce documentary on 'Shoreditch: Shakespeare's Hidden London'

2013 - 2016: Wolfson Foundation Scholarship in the Humanities