I am a Professor of English at King’s and Co-Director of the Shakespeare Centre London. I studied at the Universities of Birmingham (BA) and Kansas (MA) and at Wadham College, Oxford (DPhil). My first non-temporary academic post was at the University of Newcastle. I took up a lectureship at King’s in 1995, becoming a Professor in 2007.

I have been fortunate to hold research fellowships at the Huntington Library, the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University and AIAS (Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Denmark) and have received grants from the AHRC, Leverhulme Trust and Australian Research Council. I have been a visiting professor at the University of Queensland and am a Fellow of the English Association and of the Royal Society of Arts.

Research 

I am a literary and cultural critic and textual editor. My primary interest lies in early modern theatre, particularly Shakespeare. I have worked on Shakespearean afterlives, reception and performance history, on commemoration and cultural memory and on historical aspects of the idea of ‘global’ Shakespeare. I also work across periods and genres on late-life creativity and in particular on the concept of ‘late style’ and its shortcomings. Most recently I have worked on nonhuman animals and cultures of prejudice.

My most recent publications are Cormorant: A Cultural History of Greed and Prejudice and (with Suzanne Gossett) Editing an Early Modern Play: A Practical Guide, both published by Cambridge University Press in 2026.

Comments on Cormorant include the following:

‘This marvellous, cosmopolitan compendium of Cormorant-lore is a treasury of troubling information. Gordon McMullan has linked the exploitation and domination of avian nature effectively to the forms of conflict and subordination evident among humankind. Prejudices warranted by race and species combine in the unsettling, blackened figure of an evil, guano-producing emissary from the dark side. This exhilarating cultural ecology presents human and animal in truly complex relation’ (Paul Gilroy).

‘This is one of the most original, stylish and memorable works of cultural criticism I have read in a long time. McMullan's sheer range of reference is stunningly impressive: he moves with ease and panache between the logo of Liverpool Football Club, the nineteenth-century Peruvian guano trade and Shakespeare. It is beautifully written, packed with startling research and full of jaw-dropping surprises’ (Jonathan Bate).

My previous publications include The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (1994), Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (2007) and the co-written Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916-2016 (2018).

My critical edition of Middleton and Rowley’s Changeling for Arden Early Modern Drama will be published in 2027.

I am a general textual editor of the Norton Shakespeare (3^rd edition, 2015) and a general editor of Arden Early Modern Drama, a series of editions of plays complementing the Arden Shakespeare. I have edited Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII for Arden Shakespeare (2000) and both 1 Henry IV (2003) and Romeo and Juliet (2016) for Norton Critical Editions.

I have also edited or co-edited several collections of essays, including most recently Women Making Shakespeare (2014), Late Style and its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature and Music (2016) and Creativity in Later Life: Beyond Late Style (2019).

I was Principal Investigator for a major AHRC-funded research project, ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collections’ (2018-21), working with Co-Investigator Prof Kate Retford and postdoctoral associates Dr Sally Barnden and Dr Kirsten Tambling. Together, we investigated the Shakespeare holdings at Windsor and other royal palaces, establishing a history of the mutual legitimation of two of Britain’s best-known hegemonic cultural phenomena – Shakespeare and the monarchy – in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Teaching and PhD supervision

I teach early modern drama and Shakespeare at all levels, with a particular interest in questions of gender, genre, collaboration, performance and politics. Modules on which I teach include ‘A Mad World, My Masters: Performing Culture in Jacobean England’ (2^nd year), ‘Late Shakespeare’, ‘Shakespeare and Time’ (3^rd year) and ‘Theatre, Gender and Culture in Jacobean London’ and ‘Working with Early Modern Literary Texts’ (MA). I have also taught ‘The Birds: Writing the Anthropocene’ (3^rd year).

Public engagement

I have been fortunate to act as dramaturg/literary advisor for productions at the RSC, Globe and Old Vic, and I have appeared on radio and television discussing Shakespeare and early modern theatre. My most recent appearance on radio, for Melvyn Bragg’s long-running Radio 4 series ‘In Our Time’, can be heard on the BBC Sounds website. In 2026 I was interviewed for a LRB podcast on Edward Said and late style.

In 2016, I created and directed Shakespeare400, a King’s-led consortium of twenty-five major London cultural and creative organisations marking the Shakespeare Quatercentenary, for which, inter alia, I co-curated an exhibition, ‘By Me, William Shakespeare’, with The National Archives and co-edited Shakespeare in Ten Acts, the book accompanying the British Library’s 2016 Shakespeare exhibition.

I have worked closely with Shakespeare’s Globe for over twenty years, and in 2016 I was the recipient of the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Award. In 2000, Patrick Spottiswoode, director of Globe Education, and I created the MA Shakespeare Studies that has been taught collaboratively by King’s and Shakespeare’s Globe ever since. One of the pleasures of creating the Shakespeare400 consortium in 2016 was discovering how many of our graduates from the MA now work in various capacities for London’s leading cultural organisations (National Theatre, Barbican, Globe, etc).