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 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]

The Afterword to this EMLS Special Issue “European Women in Early Modern English Drama” contextualizes this collection in light of our continued scholarly and social investigation into the invention of “whiteness” and of a pan-European identity. It argues that texturing the flat surface of “whiteness” and “Europeanness” can enable us to “…[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]

Non-copy-edited MS Word doc of the intro to my edited collection _Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (Routledge, 2015), uploaded in accordance with publisher’s Green OA policies.

This is the non-copy-edited Microsoft Word manuscript of my chapter in the edited collection _Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body_ (Routledge, 2015), uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s “Green OA” rules.

Chapter in exhibition “Voices of Tolerance in an Age of Persecution” curated by Vincent Carey at the Folger in 2002.

The Iberian Peninsula during the Latin Middle Ages was home to large populations of Muslims and Jews. During the period we like to call the Middle Ages, much of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the entire peninsula was under Christian rule, and Judaism and Islam were officially banned.…[Read more]

Hugh M. Richmond, “Renaissance Landscapes,” Mouton, 1973; De Gruyter 2019.

This study explores some of the significant points in the evolution of a literary pattern, a recognizable topic or motif which captures attention through the poet’s mastery of language, which records the nuances of human awareness of each period. The author coins this…[Read more]

This essay recovers, describes, and analyzes the theatrical tradition emerging from New Orleans’s free people of color during the antebellum period. I will start out by tracing the presence of free people of color in the francophone theatres of New Orleans, teasing out their impact on the early formations of a francophone theatrical culture in the…[Read more]

On January 1, 1824, the English-speaking population of New Orleans celebrated the grand opening of the American Theatre, lauding
the advent of “Bards our own” and the rise of “our Drama” in the Crescent City (qtd. in Smither 41). For the city’s francophone residents, this event marked a new stage in the ongoing battle for cultural survival.…[Read more]

Moving from France to the Caribbean to the American continent, Creole Drama follows the people that created, shaped, and sustained French theatre culture in New Orleans from its inception in 1792 until the beginning of the Civil War. In doing so, it draws upon the neglected archive of francophone drama native to Louisiana, as well as a range of…[Read more]

IMC paper for panel 374 Medieval Futura 1: Now, sponsored by the Medieval Studies Institute, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington and organised by Dr Andrea Whitacre.