Jonathan Bate

Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL (born 26 June 1958), is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, scholar, and occasional novelist, playwright and poet. He specializes in Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment of the College of Liberal Arts, the School of Sustainability and the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College in the University of Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature. Bate was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, from 2011 to 2019. From 2017 to 2019 he was Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London. He was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education. He is also Chair of the Hawthornden Foundation. Early life Bate was born on 26 June 1958, in Kent, and was educated at Sevenoaks School during the period when it had state funding as a grammar as opposed to a private ("public") school. He went on to study at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he was the first T. R. Henn Scholar and a Charles Oldham Shakespeare Scholar. He earned a double first in English and returned to the college to complete his PhD on "Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination" and become a Research Fellow, after a year at Harvard University, where he held a Harkness Fellowship. Academic and theatrical career He was a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and then, from 1991 to 2003, King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University, before becoming Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at University of Warwick, where he was subsequently Honorary Fellow of Creativity in Warwick Business School. In 2011, he was appointed Provost of Worcester College, Oxford. During his tenure, he led a fundraising campaign to re-endow the college on the occasion of its tercentenary and oversaw the construction of the Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre, which was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize. Bate has held visiting professorships at the University of California, Los Angeles, Yale University, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Huntington Library. He sits on the European Advisory Board of the Princeton University Press.