The Board of Trustees of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship has announced the awarding of research grant funding to three worthy applications this year, for a total of $20,000. The decision to provide funding for the three proposals came as the result of a unanimous vote of the members of the Research Grant Program committee, said SOF president John Hamill.
“The SOF’s research program is truly an extraordinary endeavor. No other organization in the world is fostering Oxfordian research,” Hamill said.
This year’s awards will go to Michael Delahoyde and Coleen Moriarty, who will receive $12,000 toward their continued research in the Italian archives for details regarding the travels of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford; Jim Warren, who will receive $4,000 to aid in his quest to inventory and preserve Oxfordian records, correspondence, and publications from the first decades of the Oxfordian era held in the Brunel University Special Collections Archives; and Rima Greenhill, who will receive $4,000 to conduct Oxfordian research in the Russian State Archives in Moscow, which contain documents pertaining to the Russian-English exchange during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras.
“The three awards this year provide funding for research in locations that have not been investigated before in this way,” said Hamill.
Michael Delahoyde is a clinical professor of English at Washington State University, and Coleen Moriarty is an independent researcher. The two have been collaborating for 40 years on theatrical, musical, and other projects, most recently at the California Shakespeare Theater (Cal Shakes). For the past couple of years, through the support of the SOF Research Grant Program, they have been poring over archives in northern Italy for the purposes of uncovering further details about the travels of the Earl of Oxford, circa 1575.
“We are motivated to prepare ourselves rigorously for an even more efficient exploration of Italian resources, wherein must lie further records of our lord Oxford’s formative experiences,” said Delahoyde.
James A. Warren was a Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Department of State for more than 20 years, serving in public diplomacy positions at U.S. embassies in eight countries, mostly in Asia. He is the editor of An Index to Oxfordian Publications, and the author of Summer Storm, a novel with an Oxfordian theme. He has two more books scheduled for publication this year.
Warren’s project will prepare a detailed listing of the Oxfordian materials stored in the Special Collections Room in the library at Brunel University in London consisting of three parts: the archives of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, which includes the archives of the Shakespeare Fellowship founded in 1922; the archives of the De Vere Society; and the Edward Holmes Archives.
“I’m excited about this project, and eager to get started on it,” said Warren.
Rima Greenhill is a senior lecturer in Russian language in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. Ten years ago, she turned her attention to the subject of international relations during the Early Modern Period, with a special focus on trade and diplomatic relations between England and Russia under the Tudors and Stuarts. She has just completed a new interpretation of Shakespeare’s comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost, which elucidates aspects of the play which have eluded scholars for centuries.
Greenhill will travel to Moscow to examine the Russian State Archives records of “correspondence and documents relating to the 16th and early 17th century exchange between England and Russia, in the hope of finding direct references to Shakespeare,” she said.
As a condition of their grant, each recipient will prepare a full report and accounting of their research activities, successes, and findings. Grant recipients will also be invited to provide a report to the SOF membership at the annual conference in Hartford, Connecticut in October.
“The Research Grant Program is a very important function of fulfilling the SOF mission of supporting research and discussion of the Shakespeare Authorship Question. We look forward to hearing back from researchers about their important work,” said Hamill.
