NEH Summer Institute: Shakespeare from the Globe to the Global (seminar)

Source Call No. STC 15051: The generall historie of the Turkes, from the first beginning of that nation to the rising of the Othoman familie…

Directed by Michael Neill, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Auckland

June 13 through July 14, 2011

In today’s multicultural classrooms, a nuanced understanding of such early modern English concepts as nation, race, and imperial destiny is needed to address the culturally sensitive issues raised in many of Shakespeare’s plays. This NEH Summer Institute for College and University Faculty equipped college teachers with the knowledge to introduce their students to Shakespeare in his global and historical contexts. While the plays initially reflected the concerns of an expanding early modern world, Shakespeare soon emerged as a voice and an icon of empire and Englishness. He is now the most significant representative of a globalized literary culture and the most popular playwright of the non-Anglophone world. Twenty participants examined this history of reception, adaptation, translation, and re-appropriation. With a distinguished faculty and the unparalleled Folger collections, they integrated their discoveries into their courses and disseminated them through a resource-rich website.

Over the course of five weeks, college instructors and faculty explored the trajectory of Shakespeare from playwright to national figure through the rich critical and performance histories found in the Folger’s collections. Participants returned to their classrooms with a greatly enhanced understanding of the varied roles and contexts in which Shakespeare may be studied—and of the new resources available to bring those histories to life in the classroom. They collaborated to produce primary and secondary bibliographies, an introduction to the Folger’s database of digital images, faculty video clips, individual commentaries, course assignments, and annotated bibliographies, all of which can be found on the website.


Source Call No. STC 21727 copy 1: A relation of a iourney begun an: Dom: 1610. Foure bookes. Containing a description of the Turkish Empire, of Ægypt, of the Holy Land, of the remote parts of Italy, and ilands adioyning


Materials and Products

The syllabus is available here.

While the website is no longer supported, it has been archived: Institute Website: Shakespeare from the Globe to the Global

A PDF of the website's pages  with the participants' interpretive essays.

A PDF of the original promotional flyer.

View the Folger's YouTube Channel for more talks given during the institute.


Participants

(All affiliations are as of the program's date)

Rebekah Bale, Lecturer in English, Prince Mohammad bin Fahd University

Robin J. Boisseau, Assistant Professor of Theatre, Hampton University

Peter Byrne, Assistant Professor of English, Kent State University, Trumbull

Rebecca Chapman, Assistant Professor of English, Holy Names University

Jason E. Cohen, Assistant Professor of English, Theatre and Communication, Berea College

Sara Coodin, Assistant Professor of Classics and Letters, University of Oklahoma

Ryan J. Croft, Visiting Assistant Professor of English, University of Wyoming

Ambereen Dadabhoy, Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature, Harvey Mudd College

Jessica R. Frazier, PhD Candidate in English, The George Washington University

Robert Hornback, Associate Professor of English and Theatre and Department Chair of English and Comparative Literatures, Oglethorpe University

Arthur Horowitz, Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance, Pomona College

Miriam Jacobson, Assistant Professor of English, University of Georgia

Keith Jones, Associate Professor of English, Northwestern College

Carol Mejia LaPerle, Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature, Wright State University

Allison Tyndall Locke, PhD Student in English, Stony Brook University

John Mitchell, Professor of English, Oakland Community College

Sylvia Tomasch, Professor of English, Hunter College, CUNY

Donna Woodford-Gormley, Associate Professor of English, New Mexico Highlands University

Matthew Zarnowiecki, Assistant Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Languages and Literature, Touro College


Source Call No. STC 3149 Copy 1: Thomas Blundeville. M. Blundevile his exercises, containing eight treatises…

Faculty

(see also Shakespeare from Globe to Global visiting faculty)

Graham Bradshaw, Professor of English at Chuo University, Japan; Honorary Professor of English and Fine Arts, University of Queensland

Tom Cartelli, Professor of English and Film Studies, Muhlenberg College

Mary Floyd-Wilson, Associate Professor of English, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Alison Games, Dorothy M. Brown Distinguished Professor of History, Georgetown University

John Gillies, Professor of Literature, University of Essex

Kim Hall, Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Director of Africana Studies, Barnard College

Coppélia Kahn, Professor of English, Brown University

Bernhard Klein, Professor of English, University of Kent

Peter Lake, University Distinguished Professor and Professor of the History of Christianity, Vanderbilt University

Katherine Rowe, Chair and Professor of English, Bryn Mawr College

Jyotsna Singh, Professor of English, Michigan State University

Mark Thornton Burnett, Professor of Literature, Queen’s University, Belfast


Source Call No. STC 2188: Bible. English. Bishops. The Holy Bible, containing the Old Testament and the New. Authorised and appointed to be read in churches.


Essays

Miriam Jacobson, The Early Modern Hellespont: Crossroads between East and West

Sara Coodin, Inter-Faith Encounters: English Protestants and the Hebrew Bible

Carol Mejia LaPerle, Atlas Chinensis as Global Encounter as Global Encounter

Ryan J. Croft, Embodying Race and Language: Geohumoralism and Renaissance Proto-Linguistics in Shakespeare’s Othello and The Tempest

Matthew Zarnowiecki, Images of Cyprus at the Folger

Kyle Pivetti, Mapping English History in the “Universall World”

Ambereen Dadabhoy, “The General Enemy” and “the present terror of the world:” Writing the Ottoman Empire at the Time of Othello

Robert Hornback, Linguistic Racial Representation and Metalanguages of Race in the Global Renaissance

Jason E. Cohen, Of Questions, or Torture: Enforced Bodies in Early Modern European Visual Culture

Rebekah Bale, Shakespeare in Africa

Donna Woodford-Gormley, Cuban Adaptations of Shakespeare

Keith Jones, Global Shakespeare: Selected Films, Briefly Annotated

Rebecca Chapman, New Media in the Shakespeare Classroom: Complementing Performance-based Pedagogy

Allison Tyndall Locke, A New Addition to Othello in Colonial Calcutta

Jessica R. Frazier, Technology in the Classroom: Luna Insight

John Mitchell, The “Forgeries of Jealousy”: John Hayward’s The Life and Raigne of King Henrie the IIII, William Henry Ireland’s Forged Marginalia, and the Multiple Lenses of Historical Reconstruction (A Lesson Plan for Introduction to Shakespeare)

Art Horowitz, Shakespeare in Performance

Peter Byrne, The Post-Colonial Vision of the “Voodoo Macbeth


Other media

Listen to Michael Neill explain the thinking behind the summer institute and its title.

Listen to Kim F. Hall, professor of English at Barnard College, discuss the relevance of Shakespeare studies at a talk given during the seminar.

Hear Alison Games, professor of history at Georgetown University, discuss the relationships English traders formed with indigenous women in the early 16th century.

Hear Games talk about the essential role Japanese women played during the country's early period of trade with England.

Listen to Games discuss the theme of conversion on and off stage in Early Modern England.


For more past programming from the Folger Institute, please see the article Folger Institute scholarly programs archive. For more past programming from the Center for Shakespeare Studies, please visit the Center for Shakespeare Studies program archive.

Hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library. For more information about current summer seminars, please visit the National Endowment for the Humanities website.