Paul Yachnin is Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at McGill University. He was Director of the international project Early Modern Conversions (2013-2019). Before that, he directed the Making Publics project (2005 to 2010). His ideas about the social life of art were featured on the CBC Radio IDEAS series, “The Origins of the Modern Public.” In 2009-2010, he served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America.
Among his publications are the books, Stage-Wrights and The Culture of Playgoing in Early Modern England (with Anthony Dawson), editions of Richard II and The Tempest, and edited books such as Making Publics in Early Modern Europe and Forms of Association. With Bronwen Wilson, he is co-editor of a new multi-year, multi-volume series from Edinburgh University Press — Conversions: Religions, Cultures, and Transformations in Early Modern Europe and its Worlds. He publishes non-academic essays about Shakespeare and modern life, including titles such as “Alzheimer’s Disease: What would Shakespeare Do?” and “Tragedy as a Way of Life.”
For the past eight years, he has been working on higher education practice and policy. He was lead author of the White Paper on the Future of the PhD in the Humanities and has published on the PhD in Policy Options, University Affairs, and other journals. He led the project Transforming Graduate Studies for the Future of Canada, which brought together 26 universities to consider ways of making the PhD better. He led the TRaCE and TRaCE 2.0 Projects, which tracked the career pathways of 4,000 PhD graduates from 24 Canadian universities and told the stories of 400 of them. With Marie-Claude Felton and Chantelle Thauvette, he is leading TRaCE McGill (2018 to 2021), which is tracking the career pathways of PhD grads across all the faculties at McGill.
