Dr Graham Atkin

Graham is Senior Lecturer in English and Programme Leader for Combined Honours Creative Writing. He attended the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. He completed his PhD at the University of Liverpool, under the supervision of Nick Davis, on Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Graham has taught for over 20 years in the Department of English at Chester on a range of courses in Renaissance, Shakespeare, and American literature.

Graham is involved in outreach events at schools and regularly gives lectures at Chester’s Storyhouse arts centre (feedback from which can be found below). These include talks on The Tempest, The Crucible, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Two Gentlemen of Verona and staging Shakespeare.

Audience feedback from Graham’s Twelfth Night lecture at Storyhouse on 18th June 2019

• My favourite lunchtime lecture to date on Shakespeare! Actors [Department of English students] and Graham good as usual but I felt the addition of Leo as a second speaker worked really well. Carry on!
• Fantastic lecture, wonderful insight to Shakespeare’s work. Hope to hear another lecture from yourselves in the future.
• An interesting and informative lecture – great to have this link with the University and free offerings of this quality available. 
• Excellent! I learned a lot! Can now see Twelfth Night with more understanding. Great to have the acting interludes. Thank you!
• Informative, insightful, enjoyable and thought-provoking.
• I was pleased to see the ambiguity of the ending discussed. I always find the ending and its melancholy fascinating. Wonderful, excellent!
• The actors added a further dimension to the readings. They helped the understanding of events – especially when they gave two versions of the same speech.
• Excellent! Thank you. Especially student involvement and performances. The use of slides was also very good, all the different productions, etc.
• Excellent! The added use of props in the acting scenes worked very well. Graham and Leo’s analysis was most interesting and informative. 
• Thoroughly entertaining and informative as ever – you always open up new avenues! Love the idea of the hats! I think you could take that even further. More hats and a hat-stand maybe?
• Excellent! Thank you Graham, Leo, Jess and George. I’ve realised that the “neat” resolutions in the ending don’t trouble me enormously – the apparent order at the beginning might appear to be restored but after the chaos, confusion, changed identities, etc, nothing can really be the same. And if the established order can be overturned for even one night, it cannot really be so firmly established or ordered after all. We are invited to be sceptical about that “order” and not trust it again.