About

Dr Wendy Lennon FEA is a doctoral researcher at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, working across history, literature and race. Wendy was delighted to be selected as a mentee for the 2022/23 Madeleine Milburn Mentorship Programme and joins the Literary, TV and Film agency, represented by Emma Bal. Wendy Lennon’s first academic book, Shakespeare, Race & Pedagogy: Early Modern Colonialism to the Windrush is to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2024 and she has a chapter titled ‘Skin/Pedagogy’ forthcoming in an Arden Bloomsbury collection. Publications include an article in the journal Shakespeare edited by Dr Eoin Price and Professor Farah Karim Cooper (March 2021); an article in the British Shakespeare Association’s magazine Teaching Shakespeare 21; a forthcoming chapter in an Arden Bloomsbury collection edited by Professor Ruben Espinosa (2024). Wendy’s book Shakespeare, Race & Pedagogy: Early Modern Colonialism to the Windrush is to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.  Lennon is a guest editor for The British Shakespeare Association’s Teaching Shakespeare Spring 2024 edition.

As a secondary school English teacher in England, Wendy Lennon transformed a GCSE class with the summer 2023 exam series outcomes of: GCSE English Literature 100% pass rate; GCSE English Language 100% pass rate; GCSE Spoken Language 100% pass rate. With Lennon’s academic and teaching experience, her entire class of 35 Year 11 students passed and achieved highly. In the 2021/22 academic year, Wendy joined the University of Oxford’s English Faculty to project manage a European Research Council funded project which has been awarded the 2022 Vice-Chancellor’s Innovation and Engagement Award for a teacher training programme. Wendy has worked in secondary schools for a decade. Over the last eleven years she has held posts and additional responsibilities including: KS3 - KS5 English teacher; Head of English and Modern Foreign Languages Faculty; Deputy Head of English; whole school Literacy Coordinator; and a GCSE examiner. Wendy is also a FutureLearn educator with over 4,500 students.

Wendy was nominated as a 2021 Fellow of the English Association. Wendy is also the Founder and Director of 'Shakespeare, Race & Pedagogy' #ShakeRacePedagogy, an inter-cultural, inter-disciplinary, inter-generational education initiative which seeks to share, interrogate, and reinvigorate approaches to the teaching and study of Shakespeare’s plays from the early modern period to the present day.  Wendy’s research, education initiative, and writing explores Shakespeare’s plays as a tool to consider interdisciplinary interconnectedness with our shared past, our shared present, and our shared future.

Wendy is a member of boards and committees including the British Shakespeare Association’s Education Committee, the Everything to Everybody Education steering committee and the Globe & King’s College, London’s Early Modern Scholars of Colour steering committee.  Wendy is on the Editorial Board for The English Association’s journal, English.  

In February 2021, Wendy curated and hosted the inaugural 'Shakespeare, Race & Pedagogy'  event, gathering over 620 academics, teachers, students, school children and members of the public from around the world. The 2021 event, sponsored by Cambridge University Press, brought together contributions from international scholars, teachers, students, and our multilingual communities to investigate Shakespeare’s plays and their place in our educational settings.  There is a vast global community of scholars, teachers and students learning more about Shakespeare’s work through Wendy’s education initiative.

Wendy regularly contributes to conferences and panellist events including: Shakespeare’s Globe (Jan 2020); the University of York’s Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies event ‘What’s Wrong with the Renaissance?’ (Oct 2020); Wendy was the guest introducer for The Show Must Go Online’s recent production of Pericles (Feb 2021); Hark Journal’s Shakespeare’s birthday celebrations (April 2021); Penguin Random House’s Lit in Colour with the exam board, Pearson (May 2021); Lancaster University (May 2021); Beyond Borders with Ania Loomba, Valerie Traub & Katherine Schaap Williams (June 2021); ‘Voice and Audibility’ panel for the University of Warwick’s SCUDD event; King’s College London, ‘Performance in History’ (June 2021); New York Shakespeare, Father’s Day Deep Dive: Shakespeare’s Fathers (June 2021); ERC TIDE ‘TIDE Fest’ (July 2021); English Literature & Creative Writing talk at University of Lancaster in October 2022. In March 2022, Wendy curated and delivered a public engagement activity and exhibition for the Everything to Everybody project at the Library of Birmingham. For the 2022 Shakespeare Association of America Conference, Wendy was invited to be a respondent. Wendy’s response engaged with approaches to educating teachers and students in the field of Shakespeare studies.

As part of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Everything to Everybody collaboration, Wendy was featured in an exhibition at the Library of Birmingham in 2022: https://www.shakeracepedagogy.com/portfolio/everything-to-everybody-exhibition-at-the-library-of-birmingham

Prior to embarking upon postgraduate research, Wendy worked with the University of Oxford’s Department of Education and author-historian Miranda Kaufmann on the ‘Teaching Black Tudors’ project.  Wendy presented her Black Tudors research, case studies, and teaching approaches at the Schools History Project Conference at Leeds Trinity University.  Wendy was awarded the ERC TIDE Beacon Teacher Fellowship, the findings from which resulted in the ERC TIDE and Runnymede Trust ‘Teaching Migration, Belonging and Empire’ report to Government in 2019. Wendy read English at Royal Holloway, University of London, successfully completed a Secondary English Postgraduate Certificate in Education at the University of Exeter and gained Qualified Teacher Status.

Email: shakeracepedagogy@hotmail.com

Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham Student Profile

Twitter: @writerlennon

Instagram: shakeracepedagogy