Drawing on Arabic textual traditions and foregrounding the liminal time and space of administrative detention, of the expired visa, of deportation, and of repatriation, Muslim slave narratives deserve recognition as generative forebears of transnational, multicultural literature in both England and the United States. Yet these forebears were…[Read more]

Cultural memory is actively constructed through embodied and political performances. Tang Xianzu and William Shakespeare, two “national poets” of unequal global stature, have recently become vehicles for British and Chinese cultural diplomacy and exchange during their quatercentenary in 2016. The culture of commemoration is a key factor in Tang’s…[Read more]

As a work that survives and appears in more than one form, King Lear has a vexing problem of interpretation and a rich opportunity for the study of textual and cultural variants. The play begins with an aging monarch staging a fantastical, paradoxical final act as a king. It lures us toward a final act of interpretation to nail down the nature of…[Read more]

In As You Like It, Shakespeare glorifies the social bandits that survive in the Forest of Arden, likening them to Robin Hood outlaws. Near-contemporary pseudo-biographies also record Shakespeare’s early life as a poacher and youthful renegade. Shakespeare’s play might suggest his advocacy of food sovereignty and social justice, a romanticized ima…[Read more]

Moon-Crossed reimagines the central plot of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well as a means to examining the female monstrous in early modern drama, literature, and though. Why doesn’t Bertram like Helena? Because she’s a werewolf. But as he learns, she’s of a very noble line of werewolves. She saves the King of France, he learns a bit more…[Read more]

Attenuated Shakespearean references in popular cultural texts communicate meaning only because audiences, storytellers, and lovers all over the world identify the scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet instantly as an emblem of romantic love. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, and Antony and Cleopatra likewise include scenes i…[Read more]

Screened performances screen out the qualities of ‘liveness’ – immediacy, unpredictability, ephemerality, spatial proximity, danger – to varying degrees according to their media, contexts, and audiences. As Philip Auslander has argued, ‘liveness’ itself is intermedial; in order to characterize a performance as ‘live,’ we contrast it to a ‘mediat…[Read more]

“Focus on ‘Henry V'” is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, digital Open Educational Resource co-authored and co-produced by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates on the innovative digital publishing platform Scalar. Chapters include guides to early printed editions, sources, and performance and cinematic histories of the play, as well as…[Read more]

This paper examines cosmopolitanism in Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (2007) and Open City (2011). The protagonists of both novels maintain cosmopolitan identities largely by embracing an international literary culture in which elite cosmopolitan fiction relays the experiences of marginalized cosmopolitan subjects, such as the migrant w…[Read more]

This essay considers the use that twenty-first-century fictionalized cancer narratives make of Shakespeare’s words, the Shakespeare industry, and editorial and textual apparatuses to trope the ambiguous status of the post-millennial cancer patient. In the so-called “women’s novel” The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown, the genre thriller What Time De…[Read more]

This paper applies the concept of sustainability to humanities research and assessment, extending Donald Stokes’s model of “Pasteur’s Quadrant” to suggest a place for humanities- and arts-based scholarship and to identify humanistic practices and methods through which we might “assess” them. It concludes with a reading that deploys the scholarly…[Read more]

In this paper I argue that the flowering of adaptation and appropriation surrounding Shakespeare indicate not a holy “bard” who is the apotheosis of Western culture but an ambiguous Shakespeare who provides a creative space for artisans and artists (among whom, I will suggest, we can include critics and scholars). Having identified a “Sh…[Read more]

Colonialism waned in the 1940s through 60s amidst decolonization movements, yet globalization flourished in often unnoticed, hegemonic pathways. Considering cultural products of this moment leads us to ask what happens in the age of globalization that follows after an age of nationalism. When capital migrates, and labour follows, whence culture?…[Read more]

Colonialism waned in the 1940s through 60s amidst decolonization movements, yet globalization flourished in often unnoticed, hegemonic pathways. Considering cultural products of this moment leads us to ask what happens in the age of globalization that follows after an age of nationalism. When capital migrates, and labour follows, whence culture?…[Read more]

This essay argues that Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) deploys feminist intermediality to appropriate Othello in the service of a highly nuanced womanist aesthetics. The essay defines and offers examples of some important theoretical approaches, including: appropriation studies; intersectional feminism; intermediality; w…[Read more]

In 2016 Paapa Essiedu, a British actor of Ghanaian ancestry, starred as Hamlet in Simon
Godwin’s lauded Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production, set in a post-colonial
African state whose non-specificity nonetheless irritated some reviewers. We contend,
however, that the production mixed multiple referents of blackness (Eastern A…[Read more]

Because of a series of miscommunications, I originally wrote a 6000-word essay for the Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare on Ophelia and Popular Culture rather than the 1500 words that it turned out they wanted. Bruce R. Smith graciously let me go up to 3000 words, and I republished some of my research in other articles, but some of this…[Read more]