Short answers, pulled from the story.
Emma Josephine Smith, born on the 15th of May 1970, is an English literary scholar and Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford. She has been a Tutorial Fellow in English at Hertford College, Oxford since 1997, and became a professor in 2015. She is the author of This Is Shakespeare (2019) and Portable Magic, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Wolfson History Prize.
In 2016, Emma Smith authenticated a previously uncatalogued copy of Shakespeare's First Folio found at Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute. She also collaborated with conservators and digital specialists on a Bodleian Library project to digitise a copy of the First Folio, supported by crowd-sourced funding.
Yes. In 2012, Smith and Oxford colleague Laurie Maguire published an argument that All's Well that Ends Well was a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton. The New Oxford Shakespeare edition of 2016 was the first printed edition to accept this joint attribution.
This Is Shakespeare, published in 2019, is a guide to Shakespeare's plays drawn from Smith's Oxford undergraduate lectures. It discusses twenty of Shakespeare's plays and was designed so each chapter could be read independently before a theatre visit. The book was widely praised and brought Smith's name to a broad public audience.
Emma Smith has two lecture series available as podcasts: Approaching Shakespeare, in which she discusses twenty of Shakespeare's plays in chronological order, and Not Shakespeare: Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular Theatre, which covers other early modern dramatists. Both grew from her work at Oxford.
Smith's Portable Magic was shortlisted for the 2023 Wolfson History Prize. In 2024 she was made an Honorary Bencher at Middle Temple and joined the board of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In June 2025 she was elected to an honorary fellowship at Somerville College, Oxford, her undergraduate alma mater. A separate article co-written with Laurie Maguire won the 2014 Hoffman Prize.