New Swan Shakespeare Center
Shakespeare has been a part of UCI ever since the Drama Department produced A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the campus’s first class of drama students in 1965. In 2012, the Claire Trevor School of the Arts launched the New Swan Shakespeare Festival, which performs two plays in repertory each summer in an intimate outdoor theater modeled on an Elizabethan stage. The UCI Shakespeare Center was born shortly thereafter, to support the educational mission of the Festival and to sponsor innovative research and community teaching throughout the year. Combining our theatrical and academic capacities, the New Swan Shakespeare Center, under the leadership of Julia Reinhard Lupton, Professor of English and a former Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, and Eli Simon, Chancellor’s Professor of Drama and Artistic Director of the New Swan Shakespeare Festival, aims to make UCI the premier institution in California for the integrated production, study and enjoyment of Shakespeare.