Daniel Fischlin

Daniel Fischlin is Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. Founder and Director of the influential Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project, he is also the General Editor of the Shakespeare Made in Canada series (Oxford UP/Rock’s Mills Press). One of Canada’s most prominent interdisciplinary scholars, his work on the Sanders Portrait of William Shakespeare, “Revealing Identities,” was chosen as one of the five discoveries (and the only arts and humanities discovery) among 50 innovations from Ontario universities over the last 100 years by the Council of Ontario Universities’ (COU’s) Research Matters Campaign. He remains the only Arts and Humanities researcher to have won an Ontario Premier’s Research Excellence Award.

Fischlin has produced important cross-disciplinary work, including some thirty books with a wide variety of international presses. Recent books include Sound Changes: Improvisation and Transcultural Difference (University of Michigan Press) and Playing For Keeps: Improvisation in the Aftermath (Duke University Press), both with Eric Porter; Outerspeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation (University of Toronto Press); The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (with Ajay Heble and George Lipsitz; Duke University Press) and a co-authored book with Martha Nandorfy entitled The Community of Rights • The Rights of Community (Oxford University Press), the third in a trilogy of books co-written with Dr. Nandorfy on rights issues. Fischlin has also received several major awards for teaching excellence including the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations Teaching Award.

As a musician and community organizer, he is former Chair of the Board of Silence, a community artspace in Guelph he co-founded––and currently serves as its Artistic Director. Fischlin is also the founding director and lead conceptor of the innovative MA/PhD graduate program in Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph launched in 2019. An accomplished multi-instrumentalist, Fischlin has appeared on multiple recordings and is the lead guitarist for Canadian free improv. band the Vertical Squirrels.