Kirsten Shepherd

Kirsten Shepherd is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at St Catherine’s College, Oxford University. She received her B.A. in English from Yale University, after which she spent a year studying Nordic Literature and Languages at the University of Oslo before earning her D.Phil. from Oxford. She has held teaching posts at the Universities of Birmingham and North Carolina State before joining the English faculty at Oxford in 2007.

Kirsten’s research interests include the relationship between modernism and theatrical performance, and more specifically for our purposes, the writings of Henrik Ibsen. Her first published book wasIbsen and Early Modernist Theatre, 1890-1900  published back in 1997, since when her other publications include The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science (2020), Modern Drama: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2016),  and Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (Columbia University Press, 2015), as well as numerous contributions to journals and critical collections.

Most recently Kirsten has edited and written the introduction for a volume of Ibsen plays published as an Oxford World Classic, that include new translations of A Doll’s House and When We Dead Awaken, as well as Men of Honour, written by Laura Kieler, who was the real-life inspiration for A Doll’s House.