Patricia Parker

BA, MA, PhD

Honorary Doctor of Laws

For more than 40 years, Dr. Patricia Parker has been a dedicated and innovative educator, academic, scholar, and author. Her ties to The University of Winnipeg date back to 1967, when she graduated from United College. After receiving her MA in English at the University of Toronto, Parker taught for three years in Tanzania as a CUSO volunteer, first for the Ministry of Education and then as a lecturer at the University of East Africa. After completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale, she returned to the University of Toronto where she taught for 11 years.

In 1986, she was invited to Stanford as Visiting Professor and has been a permanent professor at the institution in English and Comparative Literature since 1988.

Parker is the author of four books: Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode; Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property; Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context; and Shakespearean Intersections: Language, Contexts, Critical Keywords. She’s also the co-editor of five collections of essays covering criticism, theory, race, and cultural studies.

Known as one of the most original interpreters of Shakespeare, Parker’s Shakespeare from the Margins placed her at the centre of Shakespearean studies after insisting his language must be interpreted from diverse perspectives, including race, religion, sexuality, and gender. UWinnipeg English Chair Brandon Christopher said that Parker’s third book “cemented her reputation as one of the most important and insightful scholars in Shakespeare studies,” while her fourth book “is dazzling in its clarity and its ambition, taking the reader on a seamless exploration of both the specificity of language as it was used in Shakespeare’s plays and the complex web of culture out of which that language emerged.”

Parker has made it her mission to bring literature to those outside the university by organizing public festivals and working with students to create performance-based programs within the community. Most notably, she’s the editor of the nearly two-million-word Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia, which will be launched in 2021-22 as an open-access online resource for students, scholars, and the public.

A sought-after speaker, Parker has lectured all over the world, from France, Germany, and Spain, to Australia, New Zealand, and the Czech Republic. She has also been a Gauss Seminar lecturer at Princeton, was a Shakespeare’s Birthday lecturer at Folger Shakespeare Library, and was named a Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory at the University of Toronto.

For her contribution to a generation of students, her masterful scholarship, and for championing the place of literature inside and outside post-secondary institutions, The University of Winnipeg is proud to bestow an Honorary Doctor of Laws on Patricia Parker.