Ros Barber has a PhD in English Literature from Sussex University. 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.
From 2013-2024, Ros was a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is now an independent scholar. Research interests include early modern literary biography and authorship attribution. A list of Dr Barber’s 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.
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 In 2011, the winning entry was the unpublished manuscript of her verse novel, The Marlowe Papers. 2014’s award was for an essay called ‘Was Marlowe Faustus?’.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 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.