18 Facts About Jonathan Bate

Jonathan Bate 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.

Jonathan Bate was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education.

Jonathan Bate was born on 26 June 1958, in Kent, and was educated at Sevenoaks School.

Jonathan Bate 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.

Jonathan Bate 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.

Jonathan Bate 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 Honorary Fellow of Creativity in Warwick Business School.

Jonathan Bate has held visiting professorships at the University of California, Los Angeles, Yale University, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Huntington Library.

Jonathan Bate sits on the European Advisory Board of the Princeton University Press.

Jonathan Bate was a Governor and for nine years a board member of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Jonathan Bate's publications include Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, Shakespearean Constitutions, Shakespeare and Ovid, the Arden edition of Titus Andronicus, The Genius of Shakespeare, two influential works of ecocriticism, Romantic Ecology and The Song of the Earth, and a novel based indirectly on the life of William Hazlitt, The Cure for Love.

Jonathan Bate is a frequent writer and presenter of documentary features for BBC Radio 4.

Jonathan Bate's subjects have included The Elizabethan Discovery of England, Faking the Classics, The Poetry of History, and In Wordsworth's Footsteps.

Jonathan Bate wrote the script for Simon Callow's one-man show Shakespeare: the Man from Stratford for the 2010 Edinburgh Festival.

Jonathan Bate is widely regarded as having made a significant contribution to the study of Shakespearean sources, texts and reception, to influence study and the endurance of the classics, to ecocriticism, to the revived reputations of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and of the poet John Clare, as well as to the sustaining of public discourse about the humanities in general and literature in particular.

Jonathan Bate is married to the author and biographer Paula Byrne.

Jonathan Bate was knighted in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literary scholarship and higher education, the citation describing him as "a true Renaissance man".

Jonathan Bate was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1999 and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004.

Jonathan Bate is an Honorary Fellow of his undergraduate college, St Catharine's College, Cambridge.