James S. Shapiro (born 1955) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University who specializes in Shakespeare and the Early Modern period.
Shapiro was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended Midwood High School.
Shapiro has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Huntington Library, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for his publications and academic activities.
Shapiro won the 2006 Samuel Johnson Prize as well as the 2006 Theatre Book Prize for his work 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, which Robert Nye described as "powerful" in Literary Review, set apart by Shapiro's precise and engrossing commentary on the sea-change in Shakespeare's language during the year 1599.
Elizabeth Winkler in Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies describes Shapiro's 2011 correspondence with Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, a proponent of the Oxfordian theory, about the authorship question.