Director of Research at the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, Dr Barber is the author and presenter of Coursera’s Introduction to Who Wrote Shakespeare, editor and co-author of 30-Second Shakespeare (2015), also published as Know-It-All Shakespeare. She is the author of the online compendium Shakespeare: the Evidence. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles on Early Modern literary biography, and several in the field of Digital Humanities.
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Academic Affiliation
Dr Barber’s was a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London, from September 2013 to July 2024, and continues as a researcher in two connected areas:
- Early Modern Literary History: Shakespeare, Marlowe and connected figures
- Digital Humanities: Computational Stylistics
Her work has been published in Rethinking History, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Critical Survey, Journal of Early Modern Studies, Notes & Queries, American Notes & Queries and other journals.
Prizewinning research on Marlowe
Ros Barber has won the Calvin & Rose G Hoffman Award for distinguished work on Christopher Marlowe three times. In 2011, the winning entry was the unpublished manuscript of her verse novel, The Marlowe Papers. 2014’s award was for an essay called ‘Was Marlowe Faustus?’. The 2018 win was for the essay ‘Big Data, Little Certainty: Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Henry VI.’
She has given numerous talks on Marlowe at conferences, literature festivals, in schools, and online.
In April 2024, her expertise on Marlowe was recognised when she became Patron of The Marlowe Society.
Expertise on the Shakespeare Authorship Question
She is the author and instructor of Coursera’s free online course Introduction to Who Wrote Shakespeare, which has a rating of 4.7/5 with hundreds of reviews and over 16,000 registrants to date and the author of e-compendium Shakespeare: The Evidence.
She is Director of Research at The Shakespearean Authorship Trust and writes a Substack called Adventures in the Authorship Question.
Dr Barber has appeared on numerous podcasts discussing this issue and is a popular and knowledgeable guest: see for example: Much Ado About the AQ, Episode 9: The Ros Barber Interview
She gets numerous requestions from independent researchers who want her to read their research. If you would like to book a 40-minute online consultation with Dr Barber for advice on your own research in the SAQ, you can do so here.
Access to Academic Articles
Dr Barber’s research interests include early modern literary biography and authorship attribution. A list of her published articles can be found on her profile pages on:
You can download a zipped file of all Ros Barber’s available published peer-reviewed articles
Background
Dr Barber has PhD in English Literature from the University of Sussex. It was funded by the UK’s AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) and granted in May 2011. Her thesis, entitled “Writing Marlowe As Writing Shakespeare: Exploring Biographical Fictions” was part creative and part critical. It consisted of the 70,000-word verse novel The Marlowe Papers and a 50,000-word critical thesis. The thesis explored the relationship between biography and fiction in the biographies of Shakespeare and his contemporary Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. Ros came originally from a science background. After gaining a First in Biological Sciences, she spent some years working in IT as a programmer for American Express, BP and BT, before completing a BA with the Open Univeristy and an MA in Creative Writing, The Arts and Eduction (University of Sussex).