News

NVS General Editor Judges Parr Shakespeare Prize

One of the NVS's General Editors Prof. Eric Rasmussen recently served as a judge for the inaugural year of the Parr Shakespeare Teaching Prize, which he founded in conjunction with the education and arts philanthropist Gary Parr. The prize's mission is to create a lasting award that recognizes and celebrates exceptional teaching of Shakespeare in U.S. high schools. In its first year they received more than 150 nominations from 37 states. After careful review, three teachers were selected to receive the Parr Shakespeare Teaching Prize. Each was awarded $10,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to the Awards Weekend in Florida. The winners were:

- Margaret Moran of Falls Church High School, Virginia

- Morgan Tarleton of Bronx School of Law and Finance, New York

- Linda Wallenberg of Eden Prairie High School, Minnesota

The judges were deeply impressed by the passion, creativity, and dedication demonstrated by teachers across the country. The strength of this inaugural group of nominees confirmed that great Shakespeare teaching is thriving in American classrooms. 

Applications and nominations are open again for the 2026 prize. As in the inaugural year, three teachers will each receive a $10,000 prize. Anyone may nominate a teacher and previous applicants are warmly encouraged to apply again. Full details about the prize, the judges, and the application process can be found at www.ParrShakespeare.org

Texas A&M University Receives NVS Archive

The Cushing Memorial Library at Texas A&M University has received the New Variorum Shakespeare's recent archive, thanks to a generous donation by Eric Rasmussen and Victoria Hines. The archive comprises many NVS records from the second half of the twentieth century, several of which were on display at our recent Marvin Hunt Exhibition of the History of the New Variorum Shakespeare (held at the Cushing Memorial Library). Photographs of some of the items in the collection can be found here (photo credit Katayoun Torabi): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1eV8kZv-IYIcRVv1ZL5SeJ1fPPhFSAe9t?usp=sharing

We look forward to building the Variorum's archive at Texas A&M and to collaborating with the Furness Shakespeare Library at the University of Pennsylvania (which holds the earliest collections from the NVS's history) in the years ahead.

Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare! [2026]

Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare! 

To celebrate April 23, the supposed date of Shakespeare's birth, members of the New Variorum Shakespeare were involved in a number of events:

- Our exhibition about the history of the NVS had its final day at the Cushing Memorial Library, Texas A&M University. Last chance to see!

- The Chair of our Board of Governors, Prof. Lena Orlin was one of the speakers giving this year's Shakespeare Birthday Lecture in Stratford-upon-Avon, a longstanding event co-organised by the Shakespeare Institute and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

- Cambridge University Press published the latest minigraph in their 'Shakespeare and Text' Element series, a book titled Collaboration, Technologies, and the History of Shakespearean Bibliography. Its co-authors include the NVS's Associate General Editor Dr. Heidi Craig and two of our Associate Digital Editors Dr. Dorothy Todd and Dr. Kris May, as well as our former colleague at Texas A&M Prof. Laura Estill. Congratulations to all involved.

Associate Technical Editor Dr. Scott Kleinman Visits NVS

In collaboration with the NVS, the Texas A&M University Libraries hosted our Associate Technical Editor Dr. Scott Kleinman (Director of the CSUN Digital Humanities Center) for a campus visit on 9 April. He gave a lecture titled 'Modelling Premodern and Early Modern Languages and Literatures', which was also streamed on Zoom, from 2-3pm CT in LAAH 453.

Dr. Kleinman's talk addressed the special problems that medieval and early modern texts pose for the digital humanities: variant spellings, unstable textual witnesses, and data that is difficult to standardize at scale. His talk explored the prospects of overcoming these challenges both in teaching and research settings through the lens of the 'Lexos' text analysis tool. The methods and lessons of his talk extended beyond historical materials to literature in underserved languages today and raised broader questions about what digital humanities tools should look like in an era of chatbots and AI-assisted workflows. Dr. Kleinman met with members of the NVS team at Texas A&M to talk further about how we can integrate visualizations of our data into the NVS's digital offering and we look forward to showing the fruits of this collaboration in the months ahead.

NVS Director Runner-Up for SAA Award

Congratulations to our Director Dr. Robert Stagg whose article 'Shakespeare's Arabic Sonnets' (published in 'Shakespeare Survey' in 2024) has been named runner-up for the Shakespeare Association of America's Innovative Article Award. The article can be read here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/shakespeare-survey-77/shakespeares-arabic-sonnets/E9F63019738AC8DC01099B356530EFA0

Dr. Stagg's scholarship has been shortlisted for several previous awards including the University English Book Prize, the Society for Renaissance Studies Book Prize, and the London Renaissance Seminar Contribution Award, as well as winning the University of Oxford's longstanding Charles Oldham Shakespeare Prize. He joined Texas A&M University as Director of the New Variorum Shakespeare in 2024.

NVS to lead 'Variorum Shakespeare' seminar at SAA conference

The New Variorum Shakespeare led a seminar titled 'Variorum Shakespeare' at this year's Shakespeare Association of America conference in Denver, Colorado, on Thursday 2 April. Chaired by Dr. Dorothy Todd (NVS Digital Editor) and Dr. Robert Stagg (NVS Director), the seminar featured circulated papers by and discussion among Dr. Joshua Held (Southeastern Oklahoma State University), Dr. Erik McCarthy (Gordon State College), Dr. Alicia Meyer (Curator of Research Services at UPenn Libraries), and two further members of the NVS, our Associate General Editor Dr. Heidi Craig and our Richard III volume editor Dr. Mark Farnsworth. Responses to the papers were provided by two of our General Editors, Prof. Eric Rasmussen and Prof. Paul Werstine. Conversation ranged widely, with topics including: teaching with the NVS, eighteenth-century Shakespeare editing, the scholarly contributions of Kate Furness, and textual variants in plays such as Hamlet and Love's Labour's Lost. We were particularly pleased to see a large number of conference attendees come to the seminar as "auditors".

Prof. Sonia Massai appointed General Editor of the NVS

We are delighted to announce that Prof. Sonia Massai has been appointed as a General Editor of the New Variorum Shakespeare, joining our general-editorial team of Eric Rasmussen, Paul Werstine and (more recently) Heidi Craig. Prof. Massai is Professore Ordinario in Shakespeare Studies at Sapienza University of Rome and Visiting Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King's College London. She also serves as General Editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare. Other current/recent projects include an Arden edition of Richard III (forthcoming this year) and the co-curatorship of an exhibition about 'Shakespeare and War' at the National Army Museum in London, UK. Prof. Massai has published widely. She has written two major monographs, Shakespeare's Accents (CUP 2020) and Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (CUP 2007), and edited a plethora of essay collections such as The First Folio at 400 (IASEMS 2023) and Shakespeare and Textual Studies (CUP 2015). Previous critical editions include The Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 (CUP 2014) and John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (Arden Early Modern Drama, 2011). We are honored to appoint such a distinguished figure in Shakespeare studies to the NVS and welcome Prof. Massai to the project.