Kirsten Shepherd

Kirsten Shepherd is a professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford.  Educated at Yale University, the University of Oslo, and the University of Oxford.  Books published include Ten Minute Book Club : Deep Dives into Short Reads, co-edited with Daniel Abadall and Alexandra Paddock (2026), Plays by Henrik Ibsen and Laura Kieler (OUP, 2025), co-edited with Tzen Sam and Gaye Kynoch, The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science (2020), Modern Drama : A Very Short Introduction (2016), Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (2015), Science on Stage (2006), and Ibsen and Early Modernist Theatre, 1890-1900 (1997).

She also founded and runs LitHits, a free weekly newsletter of short, unabridged excerpts from literature. Burning Down the House, a new play based on Kirsten’s research on the true story behind Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, has its world premiere in Oxford in October 2026. 

The project

Title: Théâtre and Policy Change

"This r."

Hosting Institution(s): Sorbonne Université

Selective Bibliography

• Ten Minute Book Club : Deep Dives into Short Reads, co-edited with Daniel Abadall and Alexandra Paddock (Bodleian Publishing, 2026)
• Oxford World’s Classics edition of three plays :  Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, Laura Kieler, Men of Honour, and Henrik Ibsen, When We Dead Awaken (OUP, 2025), translated by Gaye Kynoch and co-edited with Tzen Sam
• “ ‘250,000 Unnecessary Deaths’:  Theatricalizing the National Health Care Debate in Broadway’s Medicine Show (1940)” in Medicine as Theatre, Theatre as Medicine, ed. Marlene Goldman, Alice Flaherty, and Lawrence Switzky (Bloomsbury, 2026), 223-44.
• “Modernist Theatre and Science,” co-authored with Daniel Abdalla, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Theatre, ed. Brad Kent and David Kornhaber (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2025), chapter 10.
• “Stuffed Bears and Canned Tuna: Staging Animal Extinction through the Material Prop,” co-authored with Hannah Simpson, in Theatre about Science, ed. Mario Montenegro (Coimbra University Press, 2023).
• “Glaspell and Science,” Susan Glaspell in Context, ed. J. Ellen Gainor (Cambridge University Press; 2023)