Dr Ewan Fernie Reader Principal Investigator of The Faerie Queene Now ewan.fernie@rhul.ac.uk

| Career | Research | Teaching | Other Activities |

 

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CAREER
Ewan Fernie (born 1971) won the James Elliott prize for his 1994 first-class degree from the University of Edinburgh, where he also achieved the Lanfine Bursary in English, the Horsliehill-Scott Bursary in Philosophy and a number of other prizes. He took his AHRB-funded Ph.D. from the University of St Andrews in 1998, and from 1998-9 he was the Caroline Spurgeon Research Fellow at Royal Holloway. He was Lecturer in English at the Queen's University of Belfast from 1999-2003, and he returned to Royal Holloway as a Lecturer in Shakespeare in January 2003. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2005 and Reader in 2007.

RESEARCH
Fernie is the author of Shame in Shakespeare (Routledge, 2002) in the Accents on Shakespeare series edited by Terence Hawkes. As well as featuring on the BBC World Service's Meridian Writing, Shame in Shakespeare has been praised by reviewers as 'a passionate, controversial book that will spare many of our blushes when trying to justify the importance of Shakespearean tragedy', a 'groundbreaking study' which 'transforms one's understanding of works of which one rarely expects to learn anything new', which will be 'indispensable to undergraduates' and which 'deserves a wide general as well as an academic readership'. The volume presents both a new approach to Shakespeare's tragedies and a provocative ethical and political argument for reclaiming shame.

Startlingly fresh and well-written analyses… Fernie’s analysis turns Othello into an extravagant, shame-filled house of horrors, out of which steps, briefly, a revitalized, renewed, even self-recreated version of the grand protagonist.  Shakespeare Bulletin

Fernie is editor of Spiritual Shakespeares, a second volume in the Accents on Shakespeare series (Routledege, 2005). Dominated by materialist criticism since the mid-1980s, Shakespeare studies has tended to dismiss spirituality as, at best, a distraction from the painful vicissitudes of history and, at worst, ideological justification for pernicious hierarchies of race, gender and class. Spiritual Shakespeares meets the need for a progressive and adventurous new engagement with Shakespearean spirituality. 

A related current project is Shakespeare and the Devil which investigates the extraordinary association of Shakespeare with the demonic in some of the greatest artists and thinkers of ‘high modernity’ (Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Wagner, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann).

 

The argument is a clever, contemporary, and substantial challenge to more familiar ways of treating religion in Shakespeare and early modern literature more widely…. Spiritual Shakespeares offers a fresh and edgy perspective on the critically hot topic of religion…. [It] deserves attention not only from scholars and critics interested in Shakespeare and theory or in Shakespeare and religion, but also from professional readers looking for new approaches to Shakespeare's works. Shakespeare Quarterly

Fernie is Co-ordinating Editor of Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader (Oxford 2005), which Patricia Parker has called ‘without doubt the most illuminating and comprehensive guide to Renaissance and early modern studies available anywhere today'.

Together with Simon Palfrey, Fernie is also General Editor of the new Continuum Shakespeare Now! series.  For more on the series, or if you would like to find out about submitting a proposal, see the series blog: http://shakespearenowseries.blogspot.com/.

Shakespeare Now! provides a much needed alternative to what we currently regard as "Shakespearean scholarship."  At a time when most writing about Shakespeare seems hobbled by an imperative to recover historical microdetail, it is especially refreshing to find a forum that does not shy away from big ideas, theoretical innovation, and creative experimentation as equally legitimate scholarly responses to the Bard. Jonathan Gil Harris, George Washington State University As the Shakespeare academic establishment becomes ever more self-serving, and irrelevant to anyone not actually in it, a series like this becomes ever more necessary. Those who are interested in Shakespeare and much else besides will find here stimulating, life-important connections. Jonathan Dollimore  The idea of the minigraph is brilliant and captivating, but Fernie and Palfrey hold the series to even higher account:  a change in critical form that inspires a change in critical mode – the very idea of literary criticism itself. Patrick Cheney, Pennsylvania State University

Also with Simon Palfrey, Fernie is currently at work on a full-length fiction called Dunsinane.  It begins the morning after Macbeth ends, imagining that the porter survives with three sons, who uncannily proceed to discover and repeat the action of the play. Premised on a fierce refusal of the cultural separation of criticism and art, this story is simultaneously a self-sufficient contemporary fiction and a fully embodied response to Shakespeare’s play. 

In addition to these book projects, Fernie has written a series of recent articles on the subjects of Shakespeare now, dramatic action and critical form (‘Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism’, Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005); Terrible Action: Recent Criticism and Questions of Agency’, Shakespeare (2006); ‘Action!: Henry V’, in Presentist Shakespeares, ed. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes (Routledge, 2006); ‘Dollimore’s Challenge’, Shakespeare Studies (2007); ‘Hard-core Tragedy’, in Transhistorical Tragedy, ed. Sarah Annes Brown (Blackwell, 2007).

TEACHING

Fernie is course-leader of EN1106 Shakespeare. He co-convenes the experimental 'Dislocating Shakespeare' course with Professor Liz Schafer from the Drama Department.  He also co-teaches 'Advanced Shakespeare: The Problem Comedies' with Professor Kiernan Ryan. He is a main contributor to the college's flagship Shakespeare MA, teaching EN5701 The Works, EN5702 Hamlet and The Tempest: Critical Debate and Creative Reception and EN5703 Shakespeare on Stage and Screen.

Fernie supervises a number of Ph.D. students. Peter Balderstone is working on genre theory and Shakespeare on film; Theodora Papadopoulou is writing about Stephen Greenblatt, subjectivity and critical form; Will McKenzie (co-supervised with Professor John O’Brien from French) is writing on Narcissus and narcissism in Renaissance literary culture.  Given the direction of his current research, Dr Fernie would particularly welcome approaches from prospective doctoral students interested in Shakespeare and any aspect of metaphysics, creativity, aesthetics or form.

 

 

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