The VIU Summer School on Global Shakespeare: Othello’s Venice in the World aims to gather an international cohort of graduate students for a week-long, multi-faceted exploration of one of the most timely topics in the interdisciplinary humanities: Shakespeare’s global contexts and futures. In order to provide focus and coherence, the play Othello, set in multicultural Venice, is taken as a case study throughout the Summer School.
“Shakespeare” is now a global vernacular—a resonant language available throughout the world as a form of self-expression and enquiry. Written at a time of incipient globalisation, Othello both represents and challenges the fraught dynamics of international cultural contact. By offering troubling insights into the development of the discourse of race, and by coupling that discourse to an unstable conflict between Christianity and Islam, the play speaks powerfully to our own world of religious, ethnic and national antagonism.
“Global Shakespeare” invites students to imagine alternatives to this increasingly fractured world. Using Shakespeare’s poetry and dramaturgy as a resource, it asks participants to consider how connections can be made across languages, religions, and nation states.
1st Edition | July 4-9, 2022
Faculty
Rocco Coronato, Professor of English Literature, University of Padua, Italy (Scientific Coordinator)
Kevin Curran, Professor of Early Modern Literature, University of Lausanne, Switzerland; President of the Lausanne Shakespeare Festival (Co-Coordinator)
Shaul Bassi, Professor of English Literature, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy
Noémie Ndiaye, Assistant Professor of English, University of Chicago
Elena Pellone, Venice Shakespeare Company, Italy
Alessandra Petrina, University of Padua, Italy
David Schalkwyk, Director of Global Shakespeare, Queen Mary University, UK
For further information: summerschools@univiu.org
