About


Adam G. Hooks

Contact me:
email: click to email me
twitter: @adamghooks

Websites:
Iowa faculty page
Amazon author page
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I'm an Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa, where I teach courses on Shakespeare, early modern drama and poetry, and book history. You can read more about my research and publications here and about my teaching here. You can also download an updated version of my curriculum vitae.

My current research project — "Faking Shakespeare" — will provide a new critical history of Shakespearean authenticity and forgery. I am also working on a book called "Shakespeare's Bones" that will tell new stories about the afterlives of Shakespeare's death.

In 2016 I curated the exhibition "The Books That Made Shakespeare" here at Iowa. You can learn more and access an online version of the exhibition at http://shakespeare.lib.uiowa.edu.

Read an excerpt from Selling Shakespeare

I am the author of Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Selling Shakespeare tells a new story about Shakespeare's life and career in print, a story centered on the people who created, bought, and sold books in the early modern period. The interests and investments of publishers and booksellers have defined our ideas of what is "Shakespearean," and attending to their interests demonstrates how one version of Shakespearean authorship surpassed the rest. This book identifies and examines four pivotal episodes in Shakespeare's life in print: the debut of his narrative poems, the appearance of a series of best-selling plays, the publication of collected editions of his works, and the cataloguing of those works. This book also offers a new kind of biographical investigation and historicist criticism, one based not on external life documents, nor on the texts of Shakespeare's works, but on the books that were printed, published, sold, circulated, collected, and catalogued under his name.