Michael Neill (academic)

Michael Acton Fyans Neill (Royal Society Te Apārangi) is emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland. Most of his critical work is on sixteenth and seventeenth century drama; and he is known for editions of plays by William Shakespeare|Shakespeare and other Early Modern English|Early Modern playwrights. He has also worked in the fields of Postcolonial and Irish Literature.
== Personal background ==
Neill was born in Tenby, South Wales, on 29 October 1942, and grew up in Ireland until 1955, when his family returned to his father's birthplace in New Zealand.
== Academic awards and history ==
Neill was educated at Christ's College, Christchurch, obtained a BA from the University of Otago in 1962, and an MA in 1963. He was then awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to Cambridge, and a second scholarship from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied from 1964 to 1967, before being appointed to a lectureship at the University of Auckland. He received a Ph.D from Cambridge in 1974. 
Neill became an associate professor in 1984, a professor in 1995, and was head of department from 1999 to 2001. He retired in 2007, becoming an emeritus professor in 2008, and then teaching part-time until 2012. He was a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University in 2008, and professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Kent from 2013 to 2015. 
He directed a esearch seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, January-April 1993, and a Summer Institute Programme at the same library, June-July 2011. He was Lee Dulin Fellow at the Folger in 1988/9. Mellon Fellow there in 1997-8, and a Short-term Fellow in 2005-6. He held a short-term fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago in 1993, and became a visiting fellow commoner, at Trinity College, Cambridge in 2005, where he was also an academic visitor in the summer of 2008. In 2007 he came a Fellow of the New Zealand Academy of the Humanities, and of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2009. He was made an Honorary Research Associate in the School of Arts, Swansea University in 2009, and was given the Lloyd Davis Visiting Professorial Fellowship at the University of Queensland in 2019.
== Writing and research ==
Neill has written or edited eighteen books, and is the author of over eighty journal articles and book chapters. His best known books are Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford, 1997) and Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (Columbia University Press, 2000); his editions include Anthony and Cleopatra (Oxford, 1994) Othello (Oxford, 2006), The Changeling (New Mermaids, 2006, 2019), The Renegado (Arden Early Modern Drama, 2010), The Spanish Tragedy (Norton, 2014), The Duchess of Malfi (Norton, 2015) and The Man of Mode (New Mermaids, 2019). With Graham Bradshaw, he has co-edited J.M. Coetzee's Austerities, (Ashgate, 2010), and with David Schalkwyk, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy (Oxford, 2016).
Neill delivered the Shakespeare Birthday Lecture at the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1993; the British Academy Annual Lecture on William Shakespeare|Shakespeare in 1998; the Garnet Sedgewick Lecture, at the University of British Columbia in 2003; and the Margaret Dalziel Lecture, at the University of Otago in 2004.
In 2011 his work was the subject of a special issue of The Shakespearean International Yearbook, 'Placing Michael Neill: Issues of Place in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture.' As that title might suggest, in much of his more recent work Neill sought to bring together his interests in Shakespeare and Postcolonial Literature; and this bore fruit in 2004, when, along with the filmmaker Don Selwyn (director of The Maori Merchant of Venice|Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Weniti) and the Maori scholar, Merimeri Penfold, he was invited to take part in a special seminar on ‘The Maori Shakespeare’, organised by the Kenyan writer and academic, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o|Ngugi wa Thiong’o, at the International Centre for Writing and Translation, University of California, Irvine.
== Further interests ==
Neill is an occasional actor, most recently having played the part of King Lear in the 50th Anniversary Outdoor Shakespeare Production at the University of Auckland. He has written for both The London Review of Books and The The New York Review of Books of Books, and has served as a theatre and book reviewer for several New Zealand publications. From 1994 to 2007 he was a member of the Editorial Board of Shakespeare Quarterly, and guest-edited a special edition of that journal in 2001; while in 2005 he guest-edited the Shakespeare International Yearbook' Between 1999 and 2006, he did a series of fourteen interviews on Shakespeare and his contemporaries with New Zealand radio journalist Kim Hill (broadcaster); while in 2015 he was interviewed on Othello for BBC Radio’s ‘Looking for the Moor’.https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b061fmtt
Since retiring from academic life in 2020, Neill has indulged his childhood passion for alarming stories, such as Hilaire Belloc's 'Cautionary Tales for Children', and Heinrich Hoffmann's 'Struwwelpeter', by writing a succession of children's books in the same vein.
Category:Academia
Category:Writers
Category:Lecturers