Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, James Shapiro received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1977 before receiving his Ph.D from the University of Chicago in 1982. After teaching at Dartmouth College and Goucher College, he joined the faculty at Columbia University in 1985, where he is now Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He has also served as a Fulbright Lecturer at Bar Ilan and Tel Aviv Universities (1988-1989) and as the Wanamaker Fellow at the Globe Theatre in London (1998).
He is the author of Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (1991), Shakespeare and the Jews (1995), and most recently Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play (2000) which The New York Times Book Review selected as one of the "notable books" of 2000.
He has published widely on Shakespeare and Elizabethan culture, co-directed two National Endowment for the Humanities Institutes on Shakespeare, co-edited the Columbia Anthology of British Poetry (1995), and served as the associate editor of the Columbia History of British Poetry (1994).
Among the awards he has received is a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers and research fellowships from the Henry E.
Huntington Library and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. He has also been awarded the Hoffman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship on Marlowe and the Bainton Prize for best book on sixteenth-century literature.
He lectures widely in the United States and abroad and writes regularly for the New York Times and other publications. His most recent work is A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. He is married, has a five-year-old son, and divides his time between New York City and Thetford, Vermont.
