“Appropriation in the Age of Global Shakespeare”
University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
November 12-14, 2015
A conference to be held on November 12-14, 2015, at the University of Georgia and sponsored by the University Libraries, the Willson Center for Arts and Humanities, the Department of English, the Department of Theatre and Film Studies, the Office of Service Learning, and the University of Georgia Symposium on the Book.
Background
2015 marks the tenth anniversary of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. The journal, founded and co-edited by Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar, is internationally recognized as the leading venue for publications on the topic of Shakespearean Appropriation: prequels, sequels, recyclings, and rewritings of all kinds from across the globe. The journal, which won the Best New Journal Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2007, publishes original criticism from leading scholars around the world and from emerging scholars in this always-changing field.
To mark this anniversary, we are joining forces with the UGA Symposium on the Book to hold a two-day intensive conference on the topic of “Appropriation in the Age of Global Shakespeare.” As the world gathered in London for the 2012 Olympics, viewers and participants also experienced Shakespeare productions in dozens of world languages from every continent except Antarctica. The Cultural Olympiad, which ran the entire year, showcased Shakespeare through the Globe to Globe Festival, which brought theatrical companies from all over the world to perform Shakespeare in London. Currently, a small traveling company from Shakespeare’s Globe in London has embarked on a two-year odyssey, with the intent of performing Hamlet in every nation in the world. Closer to home, Emory University’s World Shakespeare Project connects U.S. university students with the counterparts in U.S. tribal colleges and other nations ranging from India to Morocco. The intercultural conversation produced from these and similar enterprises creates a new Shakespeare, one for our global digital age that necessarily incorporates many forms of appropriation, including changing media forms that encompass, transcend, and remediate traditional modes of experiencing Shakespeare such as the printed book and the stage performance.
Invited plenary speakers include: Eric Rasmussen, Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, who recently authenticated a long-lost Shakespeare folio in an eighteenth-century French archive; Alexa Huang of George Washington University, whose book Chinese Shakespeares won the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association in 2011 and who is currently a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Global Shakespeare at Queen Mary University of London and University of Warwick; Sheila Cavanagh, Professor of English at Emory University and Director of the World Shakespeare Project; and Sharon O’Dair, Hudson Strode Professor of English and Director of the Strode Program at the University of Alabama.
Call for papers
At this stage we call for 15-20 minute papers broadly addressing the conference topic. Potential subjects include Shakespearean Media Old and New; Victorian and Edwardian Shakespeares Worldwide; Shakespeare and World-making; Shakespearean Polities; International Shakespeare Texts and Translations; Global Performance and InterMediation; Intercultural Theories of Shakespearean Adaptation; and so on.
Send 150-word abstracts and a three-sentence biographical statement to Professor Sujata Iyengar (iyengar@uga.edu) and Professor Miriam Jacobson (jacobson@uga.edu) no later than April 10, 2015.
Decisions will be made by the conference steering committee.
