Nora Williams

Nora is the Associate Dean for Access and Participation for BIMM University.

She started out as an actor and classical singer, training and working in her hometown of Buffalo, New York before undertaking a joint undergraduate programme between the University of Toronto and Sheridan College. This conservatoire-style course led her to an MA in Staging Shakespeare at the University of Exeter, followed by a PhD in Drama at the same institution. Now, her creative work leans more towards facilitation and devising, with a particular emphasis on Viewpoints. She has extensive teaching experience, having previously worked in stage schools, summer camps, and secondary schools, as well as universities in Exeter, Bristol, and Essex, over the past eighteen years. Her particular interest is in innovative and inclusive pedagogies, including ungrading. She has also worked in admissions, recruitment, and outreach within higher education and – like all true actors – in food service.

Nora is an active researcher with interests in practice research, adaptation, feminist dramaturgies, violence, and intimacy, particularly in relation to classical and canonical plays. Her work has been published in a variety of venues, from Shakespeare Bulletin to Howlround, and she co-hosts an edutainment podcast, Not Another Shakespeare Podcast!, which strives to take neither itself nor Shakespeare too seriously. Her first book, Canonical Misogyny: Shakespeare and Dramaturgies of Sexual Violence, grows out of a seven-year practice research project and will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2025.