James Shapiro is the Larry Miller Professor of English at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1985. Among his books are Shakespeare and the Jews (1996); 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction (as well as the “Best of the Best” of Baillie Gifford prize winners in 2023); Contested Will (2010); 1606: The Year of Lear (2015), winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography; Shakespeare in a Divided America (2020), selected as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times; and, most recently, The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War (2024).

His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cullman Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Academy in Berlin, and the American Academy in Rome. In 2011, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He serves on the board of the Authors Guild and as Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at the Public Theater in New York.