This chapter argues that cultural appropriation can be an exploitative act but need not be; it all depends on what users do with Shakespeare. Due to the unequal status of the parties engaged in appropriative exchange, some appropriations deploy Shakespeare to protect conventional power structures. Appropriations are rarely negotiated on a level…[Read more]

Collaborative learning as a pedagogical method effectively reflects the communal character of the performing arts. By creating knowledge about Shakespearean performance collaboratively, students and educators lay claim to the ethics and ownership of that knowledge, an act that is particularly urgent and meaningful in the age of COVID-19 when we…[Read more]

“Steven Schroeder’s most recent collection of poems, Still, offers an amazing juxtaposition of imaginary elements and sensible phenomena that keeps the reader turning page after page in wonder. Poems of varied textures, from Zen-like shorts to lengthier narratives, offer shifts in perspective that surprise and delight, many with seasonal beauty or…[Read more]

The title of this collection, taken from the poem with which the collection closes, calls to mind Helen Frankenthaler’s description of the places where colors converge on raw canvas in her “soak-stain” paintings. That closing poem is a meditation on her “Seven Forms of Ambiguity” in the “1940s to Now” section of the Crystal Bridges Museum in Ark…[Read more]

Literary translations work with, rather than out of, the space between languages. Translations evolve not only across linguistic and cultural borders but also across time. It is notable that Shakespeare’s own play texts feature translational properties that can be amplified in translation. This translingual property makes Shakespeare’s text inh…[Read more]

Stories from the Hebrew Bible were popular among the Iberian Peninsula’s Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Beginning in the 14th century, Muslims and Moriscos retold these stories in Aljamiado texts in Spanish or Aragonese written in Arabic characters. These fictionalized retellings drew on vernacular language and literary forms common to C…[Read more]

Stories from the Hebrew Bible were popular among the Iberian Peninsula’s Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Beginning in the 14th century, Muslims and Moriscos retold these stories in Aljamiado texts in Spanish or Aragonese written in Arabic characters. These fictionalized retellings drew on vernacular language and literary forms common to C…[Read more]

This chapter presents a discussion of a literary genre called puthis, a premodern tradition of religious stories and plays in what is now Bangladesh, as an example of vernacular cosmopolitanism in an Asian context. The language of this genre, called Dubasha, is a “mixed language mode” (Seely 2008) characterized by the replacement of Sanskrit voc…[Read more]

Exhibition Catalog for “learning to see nothing: new and recent work on paper and canvas,” by Steven Schroeder. Eleanor Hayes Art Gallery, Kinzer Performing Arts Center, Northern Oklahoma College, Tonkawa, Oklahoma, 4 September – 18 October 2018.

The forty poems in this collection have percolated through more than forty years of meditation on “city” that began when I was an undergraduate studying with Richard Luecke at Valparaiso University. The title, In the Path of Totality, references a phrase made familiar by media coverage leading up to the total solar eclipse that was visible acr…[Read more]

The forty poems in this collection have percolated through more than forty years of meditation on “city” that began when I was an undergraduate studying with Richard Luecke at Valparaiso University. The title, In the Path of Totality, references a phrase made familiar by media coverage leading up to the total solar eclipse that was visible acr…[Read more]