The George Washington University (GWU) English Department invites you to attend our Annual Shakespeare Lecture: "Shakespeare, Race, and Adaptation in the 21st Century." This Zoom event will be held on Friday, September 18 at 3pm EDT and will feature papers from Dr. Joyce Green MacDonald and Dr. Ambereen Dadabhoy, followed by a moderated conversation and Q&A session.

Our speakers will explore how recent adaptations of Shakespeare construct and present race and what it means to adapt Shakespeare and other early modern texts in the 21st century. You can read more about them and their papers below. The event will feature captions. We will be taking audience questions via the Zoom chat function, as well as on Twitter under the hashtag #GWAnnualShakes and #ShakeRace.

Those who have registered will receive the link 24 hours in advance of the event. A recording of the event will be available after it is over.

Ambereen Dadabhoy is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Harvey Mudd College in California. Her teaching and research focus on early modern English literature, specifically drama and the representation of race and religion on the English stage. Her most recent publication, “Wincing at Shakespeare: Looking B(l)ack at the Bard” (Journal of American Studies, 2020) focuses on “how black artists and intellectuals approach, challenge, and appropriate the works of Shakespeare.” Her paper, "Something's Rotten in Kashmir: Postcolonial Ambivalence and the War on Terror in Vishal Bhardwaj'sHaider," analyzes the terminal film in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Indian Shakespeare trilogy alongside geopolitical issues destabilizing the Indian subcontinent to interrogate how the film’s depiction of postcoloniality is complicated by “war on terror culture.”

Joyce Green MacDonald is Associate Professor of English at University of Kentucky where she teaches courses on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. She is the author of Women and Race in Early Modern Texts(2002) and has published widely on Renaissance racial formations, Shakespearean adaptation, and performance. Her new monograph is Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory in the New World (2020). In 2018, she was elected a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. Her paper, “Dark Ladies, Black Women: Animating Lucy Negro in Caroline Randall Williams’ Lucy Negro Redux,” focuses on the notorious Renaissance London bawd named Lucy Negro, who in 1933 was tentatively identified as the woman who inspired Shakespeare’s so-called “Dark Lady” sonnets. MacDonald’s paper discusses Lucy’s performance at the Gray’s Inn Christmas revels in 1594 as a rare example of premodern black female performance that invokes many tropes of bodiliness, sexuality, and bold, self-aware impropriety that are still understood to mark the form and how modern poet Caroline Randall Williams takes up precisely these aspects of the historical description of Lucy Negro’s performance in order to produce the speaking self of the poems in her Lucy Negro, Redux (2019). 

Alongside the lectures, we will be hosting a discussion about the film Haider and the work of Caroline Randall Williams for GWU undergraduates in a kick-off event the evening of Thursday, September 17th. The film is available to stream on Netflix, and we will also be providing copies of selected poems from Lucy Negro, Redux. Stay tuned for more information about this accompanying discussion session!