The London Shakespeare Centre, King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe 

Shakespeare and Race: Spoken Word(s) 

Date: 4-5 November 2022 

Location: King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe 

Confirmed Speakers: Nandini Das (Oxford University), Joyce MacDonald (University of Kentucky), and Dennis Austin Britton (University of British Columbia), and Jane Grogan (University College Dublin) 

As part of our forthcoming Shakespeare and Race Festival, jointly hosted by the London Shakespeare Centre, King’s College London, and Shakespeare’s Globe, we are delighted to announce a two-day symposium to be held on 4-5 November 2022. It will have a mixed format, meaning there will be some capacity for speakers to join us remotely. 

The symposium will consider the relationship between what Barbara E. Fields and Karen J. Fields term ‘racecraft’ and poetic craft, alongside their ideological effects in the works of Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and his later interlocutors. How do the historical meanings – as well as the lived experience – of race and racism inform the reception of Shakespeare’s verse, whether in poetry or performance? How is race formulated within postcolonial and minority responses to Shakespeare’s language? And how is the study of formalist poetics affected by questions of race, diaspora, migration, globalisation, or canonicity?   

We are inviting submissions for 15-minute papers that engage with the conference theme, ‘Shakespeare and Race: Spoken Word(s)’. We also welcome proposals for formed roundtable discussions and panels of 2-3 papers. Topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:  

• Poetic style and voice within/around texts 
• Adaptation and revoicing the early modern today 
• Historical and contemporary performances  
• Colonialism and post-coloniality 
• Canons and archives, formation and exclusion 
• Education, activism, and global inequalities 
• Rhetoric or language through time 
• Accent, dialect, speech 
• Audience reception and interaction (early modern to the present) 
• Nation, ethnicity, religion, and geographies 
• Gender and sexuality 
   Proposals from any discipline and intersectional approaches are particularly welcomed. Please email abstracts (no more than 250 words) and a brief biographical note to Hanh Bui (hanh.b@shakespearesglobe.com) and Hassana Moosa (hassana.moosa@kcl.ac.uk) by Friday 19 August. Notifications of acceptance will be emailed in early September.  
  For any enquiries about the symposium, please contact Hassana Moosa (hassana.moosa@kcl.ac.uk). The symposium will be free and open to the public.