James Shapiro

B.A., Columbia (1977); Ph.D., University of Chicago (1982). Professor Shapiro is author of Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (1991); Shakespeare and the Jews (1995), which was awarded the Bainton Prize; Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play (2000); 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), winner of the Theatre Book Prize as well as the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize; and Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010), winner of the Lionel Trilling Award in 2011. He has co-edited the Columbia Anthology of British Poetry and served as the associate editor of the Columbia History of British Poetry.  He has also co-authored and presented a 3-hour BBC documentary, The King and the Playwright (2012).  He has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the Huntington Library.  His other books include The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, a Library of America volume on Shakespeare in America, and Shakespeare in a Divided America, selected by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year.  He is currently at work on two books, one on rise and fall of the Federal Theatre Project in the late 1930s, the other, Othello: An American Life. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011.