Shakespeare's Birthday Lecture: "Othello Was My Grandfather: Shakespeare in the African Diaspora"

This article is about the annual Shakespeare Birthday lecture. For other articles about Shakespeare's Birthday, see Shakespeare's Birthday (disambiguation).

For more past programming from the Folger Institute, please see the article Folger Institute scholarly programs archive.

This was a lecture given by Kim F. Hall on June 27, 2016, as part of the 2016 Anniversary Lecture Series.

This lecture discussed Afrodiasporic appropriations of Othello.

Listen to the lecture here.

Read the transcript.

Lecturer: Kim F. Hall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, Dr. Hall holds a doctorate in sixteenth and seventeenth century English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching cover Renaissance/Early Modern Literature and Culture, Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Studies, Slavery Studies, Visual Culture, Food Studies, and Digital Humanities.

Her book, Things of Darkness, published in 1996 by Cornell University Press, used a black feminist approach to interpret Renaissance literature. This groundbreaking work on racial discourses in sixteenth and seventeenth century Britain helped generate a new wave of scholarship on race in Shakespeare and Renaissance/Early Modern texts. Her second book, Othello: Texts and Contexts (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2006) offers readers visual and verbal textual materials that illuminate themes in Shakespeare’s play Othello: The Moor of Venice.