Professor Gabriel Egan

I am the Director of DMU's Centre for Textual Studies and coordinator for the English team's submission to the REF-2029 audit of research at UK universities. 

I am lead researcher on the project "Shakespeare's Textual Variations: New Insights from Information Theory", on which DMU's Raouf Hamzaoui is co-researcher, that the Royal Society is funding from 2024 to 2026 to explore what computational methods can tell us about the differences between the early versions of Shakespeare's plays.

In 2022-23 I was Co-investigator (with DMU's Justin Smith as Principal Investigator) on the AHRC-funded project "Transforming Middlemarch" that produced an open-access online scholarly digital genetic edition of Andrew Davies's 1994 BBC Television adaptation of George Eliot's novel.

I am one of the General Editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016-2026) and co-editor of the scholarly journal Theatre Notebook (for the Society for Theatre Research). I teach computational approaches to literary-historical textual analysis and the art of letter-press printing.

I welcome applications from PhD candidates wanting to undertake research on Shakespeare, early modern theatre history, computational approaches to textual analysis, editing, and cultural theory.

Centre for Textual Studies

Click here for a full listing of Gabriel Egan‘s publications and outputs.

Past five years:

JOURNAL ARTICLE Gabriel Egan "Some Problems in Using Numbers to Represent the Writing Styles of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries" Shakespeare Review 60 (2024): 695-715

KEYNOTE ADDRESS Gabriel Egan "Digital Scholarly Editing with and Without Collaboration": A Keynote Address on 6 June to the 'International Symposium on the Future of Digital Editing and Publishing' on 6-7 June 2024 at University College Cork, Ireland

JOURNAL ARTICLE Kim Colyvas, Gabriel Egan, and Hugh Craig "Changes in the Length of Speeches in the Plays of William Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: A Mixed Models Approach" PLOS One  Apr 21;18(4):e0282716. eCollection 2023. (2023): n. pag. DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0282716

JOURNAL ARTICLE Mark Eisen, Santiago Segarra, Alejandro Ribeiro, and Gabriel Egan "'I Would I Had that Corporal Soundness': Pervez Rizvi's analysis of the Word Adjacency Network Method of Authorship Attribution" Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 38 (2023): 1494-1507. DOI 10.1093/llc/fqad032

JOURNAL ARTICLE Pablo Moscato, Hugh Craig, Gabriel Egan, Mohammad Nazmul Haque, Kevin Huang, Julia Sloan, and Jon Corrales de Oliveira. "Multiple Regression Techniques for Modeling Dates of First Performances of Shakespeare-Era plays" Expert Systems with Applications 200 (2022):1-12

JOURNAL ARTICLE Paul Brown, Mark Eisen, Santiago Segarra, Alejandro Ribeiro, and Gabriel Egan. "How the Word Adjacency Network (WAN) Algorithm Works" Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 37 (2022): 321-335

JOURNAL ARTICLE Gabriel Egan "Scholarly Method, Truth, and Evidence in Shakespearian Textual Studies" Shakespeare Survey 72 (2019): 150-159.

Ongoing:

SCHOLARLY EDITION Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan (editors) The New Oxford Shakespeare, 6 volumes (Oxford University Press, 2016-26)

Computational stylistics; 16th-17th century plays in performance and as print editions

BA, MA, and PhD

Textual Studies Using Computers

Text Technologies

Introduction to Drama: Shakespeare

Digital Arts Management and Enterprise 1

I am an Arts and Humanities Research Council Strategic Reviewer 

Shakespeare Society of America, 2004-, The largest Shakespeare society in the world

British Shakespeare Association, 2002-, Britain's Shakespeare association of which I am a trustee

Renaissance Society of America, 2006-, The world's largest society for Renaissance studies

Malone Society, 1996-, A small learned society dedicated to the publication of materials for the study of English Renaissance drama

Society for Theatre Society, 2002-, A small learned society dedicated to the study of the history and technique of British Theatre

The Tony Hancock Appreciation Society, 1998-. A cultural and discussion group dedicated to the betterment of mankind

I am Primary Applicant on the Royal Society APEX grant project "Shakespeare's Textual Variations: New Insights from Information Theory" with total cost £29,831 (grant APX\R1\241032) running from October 2024 to September 2026. I am co-devising with my Co-Applicant Prof Raouf Hamzaoui a series of experiments applying Information Theory measures to digital transcriptions of the early editions of Shakespeare's plays, with special attention to the effects of co-authorship, revision, censorship, and textual corruption.

I am Project Co-Lead on the Follow-On Funding grant project 'Adapting Jane Austen for Educational and Public Engagement' with Full Economic Cost of £92,721 (grant APP31751) running from October 2024 to September 2025. I will oversee the creation of XML-encoded texts of the source texts and production texts for BBC-TV productions of Austen's Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice. This is Follow-On Funding from grant ‘Transforming Middlemarch’ below.

I was Co-Investigator on the £252,557 AHRC-funded research project 'Transforming Middlemarch' (2022-23) that is making an online multimedia 'genetic' edition of Andrew Davies's groundbreaking 1994 adaptation of George Eliot's novel.

I was Principal Investigator on the £312,012 AHRC-funded research "Shakespeare's Early Editions (SEE)" (which ran from 2016 to 2018) that explored the differences between the quarto and Folio versions of his plays to see if they can be quantified and explained in terms of textual corruption and authorial and non-authorial revision.

I was Principal Investigator on the two-year project "Shakespearean London Theatres (ShaLT)" (running from 2011 to 2013) which was a collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum to get tourists walking around and learning about the London sites where there were theatres 400 years ago. The project had £331,000 of Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding.

From 7 to 14 April 2025 I will be the guest of Kyungpook National University in Korea, giving a series of research seminars and graduate masterclasses and delivering the keynote address to the annual conference of the Shakespeare Association of Korea.

Too many to list: see my website for all past papers (available in full text download).

All my outputs are in DORA, the university's Institutional Repository

I read prospective journal articles for Shakespeare Quarterly, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Review of English Studies, and others.

I read proposals for monographs and scholarly editions for Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Manchester University Press, Routledge, and others.

Nathan Dooner on computational approaches to the authorship of the Shakespeare Apocrypha

Derya Aslan on psychoanalytical approaches to the works of John Fowles

Hanie Dorri on the provenance and meaning of proverbs found in English and Farsi culture

See 'Projects' above