Professor Marjorie Garber

Photograph of Professor Kiernan Ryan

Shakespeare Institute
Honorary Senior Research Fellow

Contact details

Email
garber@fas.harvard.edu
Address
The Shakespeare Institute
Mason Croft
Church Street
Stratford-upon-Avon
CV37 6HP
UK

Marjorie Garber is at once one of the world’s leading professors of Shakespeare studies and one of America’s foremost cultural critics. According to Newsweek magazine, selecting her book Shakespeare, After All as an outstanding non-fiction publication of its year, “Garber’s is the most exhilarating seminar room you’ll ever enter.”

Biography

Marjorie Garber, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.  She holds a BA from Swarthmore College, and an MA and a PhD from Yale.  She held faculty positions at Yale (where she was named one of their ten best teachers in 1974), and then at Haverford College, before moving to Harvard in 1981.   

A full list of her various honours, prestigious visiting appointments, articles in major journals both scholarly and popular, television appearances and invited lectures worldwide can be found at http://marjoriegarber.com/cv.php

Research

Professor Garber is currently completing a book on the vicissitudes of human character for Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Other forthcoming projects include “Shakespeare in Bloomsbury” and “Unfamiliar Shakespeare.” 

Other activities

In 2017 Professor Garber spoke at the Shakespeare Association of America annual meeting on “The End of Education,” and at the Modern Language Association on “The Institutions of Theory.” Alongside her specialism in Shakespeare, and in the place of the Shakespeare canon and the humanities more broadly in contemporary culture and society, she has published influentially on the relations between humans and dogs, on cross-dressing, and on the emotional dimensions of home ownership.

Publications

A full list of Professor Garber’s books, lectures, and other publications can be found on her website, marjoriegarber.com.  Among her works most frequently set on Shakespeare Institute reading lists are Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (1987), Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (1992), Shakespeare, After All (2004), and Shakespeare and Modern Culture (2008). Her most recent book, The Muses on Their Lunch Hour (Fordham University Press, 2017), contains, among other essays, the text of a lecture she delivered at the Shakespeare Institute, “Shakespeare 451.”