Folger Institute: Shakespeare on Screen

Shakespeare on Screen in Theory and Practice

A Spring Semester Folger Institute Seminar directed by Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe

The past two decades have witnessed an array of new approaches to the staging of Shakespeare on screen, ranging from Peter Greenaway's genre-bending experiments in "database" cinema to Michael Almereyda's recasting of Hamlet as a devotee of visual technologies as well as to Julie Taymor's postmodern collisions of time and space. The seminar will take stock of this diversity, paying particular attention to the audio-visual idioms these adaptations draw on: from European art film to the conventions of television, documentary, rock video, performance art, computer games, broadband cinema, and other new media. Recent critical approaches to screen Shakespeare have also been synthetic in their methodological and theoretical emphases, drawing on the resources of film and television studies, performance studies, textual studies, and new media studies. The seminar will focus on several of the more cutting-edge developments in screen Shakespeare, welcoming a range of approaches to adaptation, exhibition, and reception. It will seek opportunities to look back from this recent period of experimentation to the long history of Shakespeare on screen, inviting reflection on the place of audio-visual adaptations in academic and classroom practice. Above all, the seminar seeks to identify larger avenues of inquiry as well as the skills and technical resources that will be needed as the field continues to expand.

Directors: Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe are the co-authors of New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (2007).

Thomas Cartelli is Professor of English and NEH Professor of Humanities at Muhlenberg College. In addition to many articles on Shakespeare and various media, he is the author of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (1991) and Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (1999).

Katherine Rowe is Professor of English at Bryn Mawr, author of Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (1999), and co-editor of Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (2004). Her current work focuses on adaptation as a cultural process and on the place of screen media in Shakespeare studies.

Schedule: Fridays, 1 - 4:30 p.m., 1 February through 25 April 2008, except 29 February, 14 March, and 4 April. Additional screenings may occasionally be scheduled on Friday mornings.

Application Deadline: 4 January 2008 for admission. Visit www.folger.edu/institute to access our online application form and
guidelines.

Please contact institute@folger.edu with any questions.