Stuart Gillespie

Biography

Stuart Gillespie’s core work has always been, and remains, interdisciplinary, especially as between Classics/English literature (reception, translation) and English/European literature (translation, comparative studies). Two recurrent points of departure for this work have been Shakespeare and the editing of manuscript translations. He has published on every period of English Literature from the sixteenth to the late twentieth century, but is usually to be found somewhere between the Renaissance and the eighteenth century. In the four years to date he has held visiting fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library, St John’s College, Oxford, and All Souls College, Oxford. In the same period he has given lectures and talks at the Sorbonne, UBC, University of Granada, University of Iceland, University of Pennsylvania, University of South Carolina, Oxford, Cambridge, Birmingham, Vigo, and Warwick. Stuart Gillespie was in 1992 founding editor of Translation and Literature (Edinburgh University Press), now the preeminent scholarly periodical in the field of literary translation. In 2000 he conceived and planned with Peter France the five-volume Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. He remains joint General Editor, having co-edited and published the eighteenth-century volume in 2005 followed by the early modern volume in 2010. The last of the volumes to be published is to appear from Oxford UP in 2014. A new series, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Literary Translation, will appear under his co-editorship (with Emily Wilson) from 2015. These monographs are on translation as a literary and historical phenomenon. In Shakespeare Studies his large-scale reference text Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sources was first published in 2001, then in paperback in 2004. This was followed up by an essay collection Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture (edited with Neil Rhodes for the Arden Shakespeare, 2006). He is currently preparing a second edition of Shakespeare’s Books for Arden Shakespeare. In the field of classical reception he co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (with Philip Hardie, 2007) and more recently has contributed to the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature and the Blackwell Companion to Persius and Juvenal. He has conducted research on both sides of the Atlantic on manuscript English translations from the classics, some of which is described in his monograph English Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a New Literary History (2011). His principal current research develops this work into a sizeable edition of never before printed translations across the full range of Greek and Latin poetry and drama under the title Newly Recovered English Classical Translations, 1600-1800, to be published by Oxford UP in print and online. For part of 2015-16 he will be Senior Research Fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel.

Research Interest

English Literary Translation The Classical Tradition in English Augustan poetry Shakespeare