Michael Dudley Named New Editor of The Oxfordian
University of Winnipeg librarian Michael Dudley has been named Editor of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship’s prestigious annual journal The Oxfordian. The appointment was announced this week by SOF President Brent Evans after ratification by the Board of Trustees.
Dudley will assume his new position April 1.
The search for a new Editor began last fall and was headed by a committee composed of Board member Bonner Cutting, Newsletter Editor Emeritus Alex McNeil and Professor Emeritus of Theatre Don Rubin. The search brought in a dozen applications from scholars ,writers and theatre specialists from across the United States, Canada, the UK, Italy and from as far away as Ukraine.
“We had initially assumed,” said Committee chair Rubin, “that we would receive a handful of applications, mostly from within our organization. We were pleasantly surprised that interest in the journal and its editorship was so widespread. The journal is clearly respected and is being taken seriously by authorship researchers. With this appointment we think we can expand the journal’s reach even more deeply into the Shakespeare community. Michael is a first-class scholar who knows the authorship world as well as the wider world of academic publishing. He brings a lot to the editorship.”
“We feel privileged to have someone with the background that Michael brings to this position,” said Brent Evans. “His qualifications are really impressive. The SOF looks forward to many years of working with him on the journal. I know he will hit the ground running. We are all confident that we’ll have a terrific 2026 volume out perhaps even before the year is finished.
“The University of Winnipeg is solidly behind me in taking this editorship on. That is very special support indeed that can only add to the credibility of our work. I can’t wait to start receiving papers for the new issue.”
Michael Dudley is the author of the well-reviewed volume The Shakespeare Authorship Question and Philosophy published in 2023 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in the UK. He has also published regularly in The Oxfordian, Brief Chronicles, the SOF Newsletter as well as in the De Vere Society Newsletter. A member of the SOF Data Preservation Committee since 2017 and a member of the Board of Trustees from 2023 to early 2025, he is also a former Board member of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition.
Dudley also brings to the position a background in urban planning. He was Book Review Editor of the Canadian Journal of Urban Research and edited the papers of urban planner Earl Levin (published as City Planning as Ideology and Practic). In 2013, the American Library Association published his edited collection Public Libraries and Resilient Cities.
Dudley has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Victoria and two Masters degrees. one in library and information studies and another in city planning.
His published authorship essays include examinations of the SAQ and Library of Congress Vocabularies, Post-Stratfordian Knowledge in Academic Libraries as well as Decolonizing Shakespeare. Among his presentations at SOF Conferences are videos on “Meta-understanding of the Shakespeare Authorship Debate” and “Validating the Oxfordian Thesis Using Theories of Knowledge, Justification and Truth.”
From 2010 to 2013 he was Chair of the Editorial Board of Plan Canada Magazine. He has also written over a hundred book reviews for the Winnipeg Free Press and other generalist publications.
“I am really thrilled,” said Dudley, “to take this new challenge on. “The Oxfordian is already recognized as an important and serious academic publication. I look forward to maintaining the quality that its previous editors have established for it and I hope to make it even more accessible to researchers in our field in the years ahead. I want to also note that my university — the University of Winnipeg — is solidly behind me in taking this editorship on. That is very special support indeed that can only add to the credibility of our work. I can’t wait to start receiving papers for the new issue.”
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