Free Lecture and Silent Film Screening: “Shakespeare’s Romans” @ University of Queensland

Lecture and Silent Film Screening: “Shakespeare’s Romans”
Professor Alastair Blanshard (University of Queensland) and Dr Shushma Malik (University of Queensland)

Date: Sunday, 5 June 2016
Time: 2:00pm-4:00pm
Venue: Room E109, Forgan Smith Building (Building 1), UQ St Lucia
RSVP: Free, RSVP essential: HERE

Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, Cleopatra: all owe their undying fame in no small part to the plays of William Shakespeare. In this public lecture, Professor Alastair Blanshard and Dr Shushma Malik explore this legacy through a discussion of the plays and their sources, as well as analysis of the influence of Shakespeare on cinema and drama. A highlight of the event will be the screening of a couple of silent films based on Shakespeare’s Roman plays, with live musical accompaniment.


Alastair Blanshard is Paul Eliadis Chair of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland. He writes on the social and cultural history of ancient Athens, on Greek gender and sexuality, on epigraphy, and on the classical tradition more generally. His books include: Hercules: A Heroic Life (Granta, 2005); Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (Blackwell, 2010); and, with Kim Shahabudin, Classics on Screen: Ancient Greece and Rome in Film (Bloomsbury, 2011).

Dr Shushma Malik is a historian who works on the reception of the Roman Emperor Nero. She is currently completing a book on the figure of Nero as Anti-Christ, as well as researching the impact of Roman imperial figures on nineteenth-century decadent literature.