Eilís Smyth

Eilís Smyth

W.B. Yeats Fellow in Irish Literature

Dr. Eilís Smyth is a Shakespeare scholar and theatre historian with a specific interest in the negotiation between the Irish and Shakespeare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As W.B. Yeats fellow in Irish Literature at the Keough-Naughton Institute, Eilís is working on a monograph project which rereads Irish Shakespeare through an object-based study of the Irish Smock Alley Shakespeare promptbooks. These Restoration-era promptbooks make up the largest extant collection from the period from any country or theatre. The original contributions of the study lie in its employment of a specific focus on the Smock Alley promptbooks to subvert the traditional understanding of Irish theatre as simply an extension of the English stage, in its redressing of specific underlying assumptions which universally shaped previous work on the promptbooks, and in its reformation of contemporary understanding of Ireland’s role in Shakespeare’s legacy, from the Restoration all the way into the twentieth century.

Eilís was a Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin from 2023-2025 where she worked on Smock Alley Shakespeare. As a fellow at TCD she received funding from the Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute to further develop the Smock Alley project under the Research Incentive Scheme. With the support of this scheme, she brought together the major scholars of eighteenth-century Irish Shakespeare at the symposium Hibernian Shakespeare in June 2025. Papers from this conference will make up a planned special edition of the journal Shakespeare (Routledge).

Eilís received her PhD in English Literature from King’s College London. Her thesis was the product of a collaborative doctoral award between KCL and the Royal Collection Trust and was fully funded by the Sir Richard Trainor Studentship. Her dissertation focussed on the performance of Shakespeare at the Victorian court and is the basis of a forthcoming monograph entitled Shakespeare and Royal Command Performance: The Politics of Patronage, 1837-1917.

Eilís was awarded her MA with distinction from The Shakespeare Institute, The University of Birmingham, where here thesis won the Tom Matheson Prize for outstanding work in Theatre and Creativity. She completed her BA in English and Philosophy at The University of Notre Dame. She has taught Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature to undergraduates at King’s College London and Trinity College Dublin. She has presented her research at several major international association conferences, including The Shakespeare Association of America, The British Shakespeare Association, The European Shakespeare Research Association, and the World Shakespeare Congress. Recent articles include ‘Shakespeare in the Rubens Room: Reinventing an Elizabethan Tradition and the Politics of Private Patronage’ in Finding Shakespeare in the Royal Collection (OUP, 2025) and ‘All The World’s A Stage: Shakespeare and Theobald Wolfe Tone’ in a Special Supplement of History Ireland (2024).