I teach undergraduate courses on Shakespeare, early modern drama and poetry, and book history. I also teach graduate courses on Shakespeare and seminars on the theory and practice of working with material texts. I have a joint appointment with the UI Center for the Book, and I also aim to keep our Special Collections librarians busy.

I am the author of Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Selling Shakespeare tells a new story about Shakespeare's life and career in print, a story centered on the people who created, bought, and sold books in the early modern period. This book offers a new kind of biographical investigation and historicist criticism, one based not on external life documents, nor on the texts of Shakespeare's works, but on the books that were printed, published, sold, circulated, collected, and catalogued under his name. You can learn more at http://www.shakespeare.forsale/

In 2016 I curated the exhibition “The Books That Made Shakespeare” here at Iowa. You can learn more and access an online version of the exhibition here: http://shakespeare.lib.uiowa.edu/

My current research project — called “Faking Shakespeare” — will provide a new critical history of Shakespearean authenticity and forgery. I am also working a book called “Shakespeare’s Bones” that will tell new stories about the afterlives of Shakespeare’s death. I am also the co-director on two separate long-term digital humanities projects which will provide a new census of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century copies of Shakespeare’s works.

You can read more about my teaching and research at my website Anchora — which includes several online essays, as well as some of the amazing resources, materials, and activities in book studies taking place here at Iowa: http://www.adamghooks.net/