Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Susan Brock

E-mail: s.l.brock@warwick.ac.uk
Office phone: 02476 150067 (internal extension 50067)

Susan Brock and students

Susan Brock is responsible for the delivery of the CAPITAL Centre programme liaising between the Department of English, the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies, the Royal Shakespeare Company and other relevant departments within the University. This includes initiatives to introduce a workshop element into a range of undergraduate modules, the development of performance-related student placements, work experience, and special events for a range of undergraduate and postgraduate students and coordination of a variety of collaborative activities with the RSC.

Susan Brock was previously Head of Library and Information Resources at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon. She had in her care a collection of over 55000 books on Shakespeare’s life, work and times (including three First Folios) as well as the production and administrative archive of the Royal Shakespeare Company and her brief was to make these collections accessible worldwide.

From 1978 to 1997 she was Librarian at the Shakespeare Institute of The University of Birmingham (where she is an Honorary Fellow), where she had responsibility for developing collections in early modern English literature and British theatre history with, inevitably, an emphasis on Shakespeare. She contributed to postgraduate courses on methods and materials of research, her particular specialism being Elizabethan palaeography, a skill acquired as part of her training as an archivist and put to use in Playhouse Wills 1558-1642: An Edition of Wills by Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in the London Theatre (1993). She is a member of Warwick's Centre for the Study of the Renaissance where she contributes teaching on Elizabethan palaeography.

She was for five years Executive Secretary of the International Shakespeare Association, organising the 7th World Shakespeare Congress (Valencia, Spain, 2001) on the theme of Shakespeare and the Mediterranean.

Her doctoral work was in Renaissance Latin – her thesis being an edition of an academic play performed at Cambridge in 1622. Her publications include The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre 1919-1945 (with Marian Pringle, 1984), contributions to the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare , the Oxford Shakespeare, The Complete Works 2nd ed. (2005) and the forthcoming Greenwood Shakespeare Dictionary. She served as Associate Editor on the The Year’s Work in English Studies 1983-8, edited two Shakespeare-related microfiche projects for Maruzen (Tokyo), and is currently Associate Editor of the Manchester University’s Revel Plays Companion Library.