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 the W.B. Yeats Postdoctoral Fellow in Irish Literature at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, Eilís is working on a monograph project which rereads Irish Shakespeare through an object-based study of the Smock Alley Shakespeare promptbooks, the largest surviving collection of Restoration-era Shakespeare promptbooks. The study challenges the long-held view of Irish theatre as a mere offshoot of the English stage, showing that actors, texts, and staging practices moved in both directions between Dublin and London, and that Irish performance shaped the Shakespearean text itself. In doing so, it redresses the assumptions that shaped all previous work on the promptbooks and reframes Ireland’s role in Shakespeare’s legacy, from the Restoration into the twentieth century.

Eilís was a Research Ireland/Irish Research Council 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’s Research Incentive Scheme to further develop the project. 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.

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 PhD Studentship. Her dissertation focused on the performance of Shakespeare at the Victorian court and is the basis of a monograph in progress, Shakespeare and Royal Command Performance: The Politics of Patronage, 1837–1917.

Eilís was awarded her MA with distinction from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, where her 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, Trinity College Dublin, and Notre Dame, where she designed the courses ‘Shakespeare’s Afterlives: Adaptation and Appropriation’ and ‘Shakespeare in Ireland: Playtexts, Performance, and Politics’. She has presented her research at several major international conferences, including the Shakespeare Association of America, the British Shakespeare Association, the European Shakespeare Research Association, and the World Shakespeare Congress. In August 2026 she gave the keynote lecture ‘Yeats, Shakespeare, and Belfast’s Lyric Theatre’ at the Threshold Festival celebrating W.B. Yeats at Notre Dame’s Global Centre at Kylemore. Recent publications include ‘Shakespeare in the Rubens Room: Reinventing an Elizabethan Tradition and the Politics of Private Patronage’ in Shakespeare’s Afterlife 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). She has two articles in progress: one the Smock Alley Julius Caesar promptbook, and one developed from her Kylemore keynote.