Shakespeare Institute to Leave Stratford for a Birmingham Campus in 2027

Updated 14 November: two petitions now ask the university to keep the Institute in Stratford. Read about the petitions.

Updated 13 November, evening: the university’s and Professor Dobson’s own words, the Institute’s history and more on the library.

The University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute is to leave Stratford-upon-Avon. Staff were told on Thursday 12 November that from the start of the 2027/28 academic year, in September 2027, the Institute will move out of Mason Croft on Church Street and into the university’s main campus at Edgbaston. The news was first reported by the Stratford Herald on Friday afternoon, and the university has confirmed the move to the paper.

The Herald calls it a closure. The university calls it a move, and says the Institute itself will carry on at Edgbaston. Its director expects the move to end its taught courses, as he explains below.

What the university says

A university spokesperson told the Herald that Shakespeare studies matters to the university’s global reputation, and that the move is “an opportunity for the Shakespeare Institute to thrive in a new setting”. At Edgbaston it will sit alongside the university’s specialists in literature, theatre, film, television, music, digital media, history and performance, and close to the city’s creative industries.

The university hasn’t said what will happen to Mason Croft, its garden or its playing fields, and it hasn’t published a statement on its own website yet.

The director will resign

The Institute’s director, Professor Michael Dobson, told supporters in a statement shared with the Herald that staff had no say: “we were not allowed to inform it,” he says of the decision. He doesn’t expect the Institute’s long-running MA programmes in Shakespeare studies to survive long in Birmingham, because students choose it to be in Shakespeare’s home town and near the RSC, and he fears his colleagues will then face redundancy.

He says he will resign “rather than aiding and abetting this move”. His deputy, Professor Tiffany Stern, has accepted a post at Yale.

Fears for the library

The Institute’s library holds about 60,000 hand-picked volumes, which Professor Dobson describes as the largest single collection of Shakespeare criticism in the country, along with annotated scripts and archive papers that local people have deposited there. Local people helped raise the money for the library building about 30 years ago, he says.

He says the university’s main library in Birmingham has no room for the collection, and that because it favours digital holdings over printed ones, its managers “may prefer to discard or even destroy much of the collection” rather than move it. The university hasn’t responded to that point. If you have items deposited in the library and don’t want them to go to Birmingham, he says the Institute’s librarians will be in touch.

What it means for Stratford

The Institute was founded at Mason Croft, the listed house on Church Street that was once the home of the novelist Marie Corelli, in 1951. It isn’t the first time it has left: it spent a period on the Birmingham campus before returning to Mason Croft in the 1980s under Professor Stanley Wells, and the library building made its place in Stratford permanent.

Its postgraduate students and visiting scholars are regulars at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and the move takes jobs and spending out of the town centre. Nothing changes this academic year: the move is due in September 2027.

Two petitions now ask the university to think again, one started by the Stratford Herald and one by a former student. Here’s how to sign them.

We’ll add what the university says about Mason Croft and the library, and responses from the RSC, the Birthplace Trust and the councils, as they come in.

Details checked on 13 November 2026 using the Stratford Herald’s report, which carries the university’s statement and Professor Dobson’s statement in full, and the University of Birmingham’s own pages on the Institute and Mason Croft.

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Alex Harrington

Alex Harrington grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon and runs What's up, Stratford? as an independent guide to the town.