About me

I am a professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Toronto, where I hold an undergraduate appointment at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), and graduate appointments in English and the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies on the St George campus. At UTM, I am also Associate Chair of the Department of English and Drama and Director of our Drama Programs, which include a unique actor training program offered jointly with Sheridan College.

I was born and raised in the South of Germany, and after high school and alternative service (still a thing in the 1990s), moved to the UK to read English at Oxford (Balliol College). I spent the next two years at Harvard, completing a Masters in English and American Literature, returned to Europe for a little over a year to make films, and then decided to continue pursuing an academic career. I earned my PhD from Harvard in 2004, and then, after a year as an Assistant Professor of English at Miami University in Ohio, moved to the University of Toronto, where I have taught ever since. From 2011 to 2016, I served as Chair of the Department of English and Drama at UTM.

My graduate training was primarily in the dramatic literature of early modern England, with a strong focus on Shakespeare (my PhD supervisors were Stephen Greenblatt and Marjorie Garber…), and this has remained a central research interest of mine. I used to work on the history of the book, with particular foci on the publishing business and habits of reading, and my first book was heavily preoccupied with early modern legal history, but for the past decade and more, I have primarily worked and published as a theatre historian. In recent years, I have become increasingly interested in modern and contemporary performance, and I am pursuing a number of research projects related to the staging of “classics” in the 20th and 21st centuries. My major current endeavour is a book about Shakespeare performances in Berlin between 1920 and 2020, which is grounded in extensive archival research of a kind I could only dream of when working on early modern theatre!

Finally, I maintain strong connections to the world of professional theatre. I occasionally direct, and have translated and adapted a number of plays.

If you would like to get in touch to discuss anything on this website, shared research interests, or potential collaborations, please don’t hesitate to email me at holger.syme(at)utoronto.ca. You can also find me on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and, for now, on the site formerly known as Twitter.