René Weis is frequently invited to give lectures to a wide variety audiences across the range of his interests, particularly Shakespeare, the Edith Thompson case, and the Cathars. Among many other places, he has spoken at New Scotland Yard, the Oxford French and Occitan Society, Cathar conferences in Toulouse and Montaillou, the Globe Theatre, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, local history groups in East London, and the Centre National de la Littérature in Luxembourg. He regularly visits schools to talk about Shakespeare and raise awareness of the UCL English Department in line with UCL’s policy of reaching out educationally to the wider community.
René Weis teaches Shakespeare at both undergraduate and MA levels and has supervised a number of Shakespeare PhDs. Among his other teaching interests are the classical background of English literature, particularly Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, and Ovid; and modern drama from Ibsen and Chekhov to Miller, Williams, Pinter, and Mamet. Weis is keen to supervise further research on any aspect of Shakespeare, and particularly in the areas of editing, bibliography, biography, topography, local history, translations, and the relevance of the sectarian divides in Shakespeare’s England to his works.
René Weis FRSA was educated at the University of Edinburgh, the Università per stranieri di Perugia, and at UCL, where he has worked since 1980. He was made a Reader in 1996 and became a Professor in 1998. He has acted as External Examiner at King’s College London (English), and served a four-year term as Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UCL. He has held a number of departmental posts over the years, and has served on senior UCL appointments committees. He was a regular reviewer and panel member for doctoral and post-doctoral funding proposals for the Fonds National de la Recherche in Luxembourg. He is a governor of Goodenough College in London and in 2014 succeeded Lord Fellowes as the President of its Advisory Council. In 2014 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) for his 'outstanding contribution to the study and teaching of English Literature'.
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