Shakespeare's Afterlife in the Royal Collection

Sally Barnden (BA York, MA, and PhD King’s College London) is a Lecturer in Literature and Visual Culture at Swansea University, and was a postdoctoral research associate for ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collection.’ She is the author of Still Shakespeare and the Photography of Performance (Cambridge, 2020) and Shakespeare and the Royal Actor (Oxford, 2024).

Gordon McMullan (BA Birmingham, MA Kansas, DPhil Oxford) is a Professor of English at King’s College London, where he has worked since 1995; prior to that he was a lecturer in English at Newcastle University. He has held fellowships in the United States, Australia, and Denmark; he has published in the fields of Shakespeare, early modern drama, late-life creativity, and environmental humanities; and in 2016 he received the Globe Theatre’s Sam Wanamaker Award for his creation and direction of Shakespeare400, London’s consortium marking the Shakespeare Quatercentenary. He was Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded project ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collection’ (2018-22).

Kate Retford (BA, MA, and PhD University of Warwick) is a Professor of History of Art and Head of the School of Historical Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on eighteenth-century British art, particularly on gender, portraiture, and the country house. Her research has been funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the AHRC, the British Academy, and, most recently, the Leverhulme Trust. Her recent publications include The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2017) and The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting and Display, co-edited with Susanna Avery-Quash (2019).

Kirsten Tambling completed her PhD in History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London on the art of Jean-Antoine Watteau and William Hogarth. She was a postdoctoral research associate for ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collection’, and subsequently Associate Lecturer on the Curating the Art Museum programme at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has worked in various museums and collections, including the Royal Collection Trust and Watts Gallery, where she was co-curator of the exhibition James Henry Pullen: Inmate, Inventor, Genius (2018). She has published articles on eighteenth-century art, the intersection of art and psychiatry and the history of collections.