Sponsored by The University Seminar on Shakespeare
This symposium brings together scholars and artists to consider the intersections of racial, social, and environmental justice in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Too often, these crucial issues run on parallel tracks in early modern literary scholarship. Yet the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries showcase how premodern ideas of racial difference were inseparable from questions of geographical distance, understandings about “nature,” and the complexity of the more-than-human world more broadly. The symposium will help us envision new methods and practices that enable us, as scholars and artists, to engage ethically with the complex entanglements of racial and environmental injustice in Shakespeare’s world and in ours. This symposium invites scholars and artists working on Shakespeare and the environment, race, and colonialism to come together to address justice, equality, and disenfranchisement in concerted and collaborative ways.
