Celebrating Shakespeare: In Conversation

Date: 23 April, 2016
Time: 2:00-3:00 pm
Venue: Theatre, Lower Ground 1, National Library of Australia,  Parkes Place, Canberra, ACT
Register: Tickets $15 (refreshments included): https://register.eventarc.com/33425/in-conversation-celebrating-shakespeare

To mark Europe Day and the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, Emeritus Professor Ian Donaldson, University of Melbourne, and Professor Ian Gadd, Bath Spa University, explore how the playright and poet became a global phenomenon.

Emeritus Professor Ian Donaldson, FBA FRSE FAHA

Emeritus Professor Ian Donaldson, FBA FRSE FAHA has had an outstanding academic and professional career and is one of Australia’s most energetic and effective champions of the importance and value of the Humanities.

Currently an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, he has previously been Fellow and Lecturer of Wadham College, Oxford (1962-9), a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge (1995-2005), and has chaired the English Faculties of both these Universities. He was also Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, Edinburgh University, perhaps the most distinguished and certainly the oldest Chair of English Language and Literature in the world. Resigning his Oxford fellowship to return to Australia in 1969, he was Professor of English at the ANU and also Head of Department (1969-91). In the last three years Professor Donaldson has produced two related publications, the culmination of a life-time of scholarly work: his authoritative biography, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford: OUP, 2011), and his General Editorship of the Cambridge Edition of The Works of Ben Jonson (Cambridge: CUP, 2012). The Cambridge Works has been praised in the London Review of Books as ‘[a] formidable enterprise’ while the Times Literary Supplement has described it as an ‘outstanding edition’ and an ‘invaluable scholarly resource’. The biography, Ben Jonson: A Life, has also been published to critical acclaim.

Professor Ian Gadd

Ian Gadd is Professor of English Literature at Bath Spa University and President of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), the largest scholarly society in the world devoted to the study of the history of the book. His research focuses on the printing and publishing of books in England in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was the Charlton Hinman Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, in 2011.