Grace Ioppolo is Professor Emerita and formerly Professor of Shakespearean and Early Modern Drama at the University of Reading. She has been an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London for many years.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Grace completed her BA, MA and PhD at UCLA, and her PhD thesis was published by Harvard University Press in 1991 as Revising Shakespeare. Before moving to London in 1998, she taught at UCLA, Berkeley and the American University in Washington, DC. In the UK, she has taught at the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, and the University of Hertfordshire, before taking up a position at the University of Reading. In 2008, she was awarded the Outstanding Teacher Award in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.
Her research has focussed on the original handwritten manuscripts of sixteenth and seventeenth-century playwrights and poets. In particular, she specialises in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Thomas Heywood and Thomas Middleton. She has been awarded visiting fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Newberry, as well as the American and British Bibliographical Societies. She has published and edited numerous academic books and scholarly essays. In 2004, the founded and directed the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitalisation Project.
Grace her a large following on Twitter as @ProfShakespeare. Her account provides daily links to stories about literature and manuscript culture and is followed by the British Library, Shakespeare’s Globe, the Museum of London Archaeology service among other institutions, as well as scholars and students around the world. She frequently shares her absolute thrill at discovering previously unknown manuscripts.