Congratulations Emeritus Professor Holbrook

Congratulations to Professor Peter Holbrook who was appointed Emeritus Professor last month. Professor Holbrook joined UQ’s then Department of English (now School of Communication and Arts) in 1996 as a full-time tenured Lecturer and, after promotions to Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor, eventually became Professor of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Literature in 2010.

From 2011 onwards, he led (until 2020) the UQ Node of the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions (Europe, 1100-1800) (CHE). Funded to approximately AUD 35 million, CHE was a collaboration of five Australian universities (UWA, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, and UQ), and during its lifetime the UQ Node supported 6.5 full-time postdoctoral researchers in Literature, four of them on 3-year contracts as well as an extensive public outreach program (with a full-time Engagement and Outreach Officer) and had numerous Associate Investigators (receiving additional CHE research support funds) across multiple UQ Schools and Faculties. All in, he has spent 24 years altogether at UQ. 

Outside UQ, Professor Holbrook likewise demonstrates eminence. He was elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2013. He served for three and a half years on the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, and for one year (2021) as Chair of the Fiction and Poetry Panel for the Prime Minister’s Awards for Literature. He has held an individual ARC Discovery Grant and was from 2011-2016 Chair of the International Shakespeare Association, which is based in Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. In January 2021, Peter left UQ to take up a five-year contract as Professor and Director of Literature in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, a contract that ended on 31 January, 2026. He is currently an Honorary Professor with the School of Communication and Arts at UQ, and lives in Brisbane.

Professor Holbrook's publications include Shakespeare’s Individualism (Cambridge University Press in the U.K., 2010) and Ideas of Freedom: English Renaissance Tragedy (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), along with a co-edited collection of essays with Cambridge UP and a monograph with University of Delaware Press, as well as numerous articles in major international journals (for instance Textual Practice, Modern Philology, and Shakespeare Survey). He has written widely for newspapers and other public-facing venues in Australia and has had a long-term interest in the effective teaching of Literature in high-schools (UQ CHE accordingly did a lot of outreach and professional development work with Queensland teachers). He is currently revising a monograph (essentially complete and recommended for publication) for Oxford University Press in the U.K., entitled Poet of Nature: An Essay on Shakespeare, Literature, and Socialism. He is at work on another book project about Shakespeare, Proust, and art.