Emma Smith (scholar)


Emma Josephine Smith is an English literary scholar and academic whose research focuses on early modern drama, particularly William Shakespeare, and the history of the book. She has been a Tutorial Fellow in English at Hertford College, Oxford since 1997 and Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford since 2015.
She has published and lectured widely on Shakespeare and on other early modern dramatists, and worked with numerous theatre companies. Her lectures are available as podcasts Not Shakespeare: Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular Theatre and Approaching Shakespeare.

Life and career

Born and raised in Leeds, Smith was educated at Abbey Grange school and did her undergraduate degree at Somerville College, Oxford, from 1988 to 1991. In an interview with the Oxford Review of Books, Smith said that she "didn't go to a school or come from a family where people particularly did go to Oxford" but that she also was not "from a terribly deprived background". She was a Prize Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and completed her doctorate in 1997 during her fellowship at the college. Smith has credited the Prize Fellowship as helping her become an academic but said she found the time "isolating" and "felt the miss of having a graduate cohort". She joined Hertford College as Tutorial Fellow in English in 1997, having previously held a junior academic position at New Hall, Cambridge. In November 2015 she was awarded the Title of Distinction of Professor of Shakespeare Studies by the University of Oxford.
As part of her work on Shakespeare's First Folio, Smith worked with conservators, digital specialists and crowd-sourced funding on a Bodleian Library project to digitise a copy of the book. In 2016, she authenticated a new copy of the First Folio found at Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute.
With Laurie Maguire of Oxford University she published a new argument in 2012 that Shakespeare's play All's Well that Ends Well was a collaboration with Thomas Middleton. The New Oxford Shakespeare edition of 2016, edited by Bourus et al., was the first printed edition of the play to accept this joint attribution. Another article with Laurie Maguire won the 2014 Hoffman Prize. She was a script advisor to Josie Rourke's 2018 film Mary Queen of Scots and the BBC’s 2023 documentary series Shakespeare: The Rise of a Genius. She edits the Cambridge University Press journal Shakespeare Survey and is general editor of the Oxford World's Classics Shakespeare series for Oxford University Press.
Smith published This Is Shakespeare in 2019. The book was published as a guide to Shakespeare's plays. It extends from her lectures for Oxford undergraduates, which were also used as the basis for her Approaching Shakespeare podcast, where she discusses 20 of Shakespeare's plays in chronological order. She says she wanted the book "to give a sense of Shakespeare's range across his career" but also "to keep the individual chapters self-contained, so that you could read one before going to the theatre." This is Shakespeare was well-received and "catapulted name into literary renown"; Smith said the response was "exciting and unexpected".
She was shortlisted for the 2023 Wolfson History Prize for Portable Magic, which she described as "a book about books, rather than words". In 2024 she was made an at Middle Temple. In September 2024 Smith joined the board of the Royal Shakespeare Company, having been named an Associate Scholar of the RSC in 2021. Her name is one of those featured on the sculpture Ribbons, unveiled in 2024.
In June 2025, Smith was elected to an honorary fellowship at her alma mater, Somerville College, Oxford.

Broadcasting

Smith has made numerous appearances as an expert commentator on the BBC Radio 4 discussion programme In Our Time. Episodes featuring Smith include: Marlowe ; Shakespeare's Plantagenet histories ; Macbeth ; Shakespeare's sonnets ; Romeo and Juliet ; Twelfth Night ; and Thomas Middleton. In August 2024 she also appeared on the Radio 4 series Great Lives discussing Marlowe with director Julien Temple.

Personal life

Smith lives in Oxford with her partner Elizabeth.

Selected publications

Oxford podcasts

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