Russell Jackson joined the department as Allardyce Nicoll chair in 2004. Previously he taught at the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama and in the drama department of the University College of North Wales, Bangor. From 1978 to 2004 he was a Fellow (and latterly, Director) of the Shakespeare Institute, the University of Birmingham’s Stratford-based centre for graduate studies in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Russell’s particular research interests are in Shakespearean performance, Anglo-European theatrical relationships, Victorian and Edwardian theatre and the History of Film. He has edited plays by Oscar Wilde in the ‘New Mermaids’ series, Victorian Theatre: a New Mermaid Sourcebook (A&C Black, 1989), and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (CUP, 2000; 2nd edition 2007).

He has published on a wide range of topics - from Victorian fairy painting to Noël Coward. In 1999 the Society for Theatre Research published his translation of articles by the German novelist Theodor Fontane, under the title Shakespeare in London, 1851-58. With Jonathan Bate he edited The Oxford Illustrated History of Shakespeare on Stage (2nd edition, 2001) and he collaborated with Robert Smallwood on two volumes in the ‘Players of Shakespeare’ series for Cambridge University Press. From 1994 to 2004 he reviewed Stratford productions for Shakespeare Quarterly, and his book on stagings of Romeo and Juliet appears in the series ‘Shakespeare at Stratford,’ under the New Arden imprint (2003). From 1985 to 2004 was an editor of Theatre Notebook, the journal of the Society for Theatre Research, and he remains on its advisory board. He is on the editorial board of Shakespeare Survey and the online journal Shakespeare.

A monograph, Shakepeare Films in the Making: Vision, Production and Reception appeared from Cambridge University Press in 2007. Current projects include a book on the representation of theatres on film and a study of American TV Shakespeare.

Since the mid-1980s he has worked as text adviser with Kenneth Branagh on stage and radio productions, and on all his Shakespeare films, and also on films by Oliver Parker (Othello, An Ideal Husband), John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) and, most recenlty, the remake of The Wolf Man. His diary of the filming of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet accompanies the published screenplay. He has served on the boards of the Oxford Stage Company and Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and as an honorary governor of the RSC. In 2006 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the University of Wales, Bangor, for his contributions to the study of Shakespeare on Film.