Professor Sir Jonathan Bate CBE FBA FRSL is Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities at the College of Liberal Arts, the School of Sustainability and the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College in the University of Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature and was Provost from 2011 to 2019.

He studied English at Cambridge and Harvard universities and is a biographer, critic, broadcaster and scholar, with research interests in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, Romanticism, biography and life-writing, ecocriticism, contemporary poetry, visual culture and theatre history.

He has written several books on Shakespeare has received literary awards and nominations including the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, and the NAMI (New York) Book Award.

Jonathan has broadcast for the BBC and has written for the Guardian, Times, Telegraph, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and TLS. He was Vice-President of the British Academy and served on the Board of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was consultant curator for the British Museum’s major Round Reading Room exhibition for the London 2012 Olympics Festival of Culture.