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. The interlinked racial and environmental crises of our time seem to compound faster than mitigating efforts, let alone the human imagination, can keep up. But the reparative work they demand requires a deep investigation of the early modern past. As the imaginative literature from this period demonstrates, 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. By bringing together scholars and artists who have been considering questions of racialization and environmental issues in early modernity, this symposium will help us envision new methods and practices that enable us to engage ethically with the complex entanglements of racial and environmental injustice in Shakespeare’s world and in ours.
SCHEDULE
8:30 AM
Registration and Welcome
9:00 AM – 10:00 AM
PANEL I: Echoes of Early Modernity
Ruben Espinosa, Arizona State University
Lowell Duckert, University of Delaware
10:15 AM – 11:15 AM
PANEL II: The More-than-Human World
Patricia Cahill, Emory University
Dennis Britton, University of British Columbia (Canada)
11:30 AM – 1:00 PM
Lunch
1:15 PM – 2:15 PM
PANEL III: Race and Place
Vin Nardizzi, University of British Columbia (Canada)
Eli Cumings, Columbia University
2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
KEYNOTE CONVERSATION: Environmental Racism and Narratives of Settlement
Madeline Sayet, Arizona State University
Scott Manning Stevens, Syracuse University