Claude Fretz is Research Fellow in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast, and Associate Fellow of the research and doctoral training centre 'European Dream-cultures' at Saarland University in Germany (traumkulturen.de). Claude works on the AHRC-funded project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’, and is the author of Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare’s Genres (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Before coming to Queen’s, he was a Teaching Associate in early modern literature at the University of Birmingham. He completed his fully-funded PhD research on dreams and sleep in Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute.

Before joining Queen's as a Research Fellow, Claude taught widely across the early modern period in the University of Birmingham's English Department and at the Shakespeare Institute. He has also taught Victorian fiction, medieval literature, eighteenth-century poetry, and literary theory.

Claude read English at Royal Holloway, where he graduated with first-class honours and was awarded the Gertrude Schryver Prize as well as various external scholarships. He then went on to study for the MA in ‘Shakespeare in History’ (awarded with distinction) at University College London, for which he was also awarded external graduate scholarships. His PhD research at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute was fully funded through a College of Arts and Law doctoral scholarship.

In 2018, Claude was awarded a Mercator Fellowship by Saarland University in recognition of his work on dreams and sleep.

Claude is working on the AHRC-funded international and cross-disciplinary project 'Performing Restoration Shakespeare'. This project brings together artists and scholars  to investigate how and why Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare succeeded in performance in their own time, and how and why they can succeed in performance today. The project's partners include the Globe, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Claude is also the author of Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare's Genres (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). This book will examine the dramatic functions of dreams and sleep in Shakespearean comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy or romance. It explores how Shakespeare systematically exploited early modern physiological, theological, and political understandings of dreams and sleep in order to help him reshape conventions of dramatic genre.