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

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

This was a summer 2011 seminar directed by Michael Neill, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Auckland, from June 13 to July 14, 2011 at the Folger Institute Center for Shakespeare Studies. For more information about current summer seminars, please visit the National Endowment for the Humanities website.

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 institute 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.