The English Department is pleased to host Anti-Racist Romeo and Juliet - a roundtable discussion between scholars working on different areas of Shakespeare and Early Modern studies, who will explore aspects of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy through a lens of critical race theory.

Most students are familiar with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet through their experiences of the text either in the school curriculum, as undergraduates in the King’s English Department, or through their engagement with the play across various strands of popular culture. This conversation will bring light to a less-familiar dimension of the play, as the panelists explore some ways in which this well known work both informs and is informed by pre-modern and contemporary understandings of race. The discussion will invite students to think productively about how to approach Shakespeare’s works through an anti-racist framework.

This event is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students in English literary studies, but all interested in interrogating forms and legacies of race and racism through history, literature, and theatre and performance are encouraged to attend.

Speakers:

Professor. Ruben Espinosa is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he works on issues of race, language, ethnic identity, assimilation, and immigration at the intersection of Shakespeare Studies and Latinx Studies. He is the author of Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England (2011), and the co-editor of Shakespeare and Immigration (2014). He is currently working on two monographs, Shakespeare on the Border: Language, Legitimacy and La Frontera, and Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism which will be out in June this year.

Dr. Natalya Din-Kariuki is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research examines the literary and intellectual history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a particular focus on travel writing, transnational and transcultural encounters, modes of cosmopolitanism, and rhetoric and poetics. At present, she is completing her first book project, provisionally titled Peregrine Words: The Rhetoric of Seventeenth-Century English Travel Writing.

Dr. Hannah Crawforth is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature in the English Department at King’s College London. Her work centres largely on poetry and poetics, with a particular focus on historically-informed close reading, extending to the histories of individual words, literary forms and genres. Her first monograph, Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature, was published by Cambridge in 2013. She has also co-authored Shakespeare in London, published by Arden (Bloomsbury). She is currently writing a book on the early modern reception of Euripides.

Professor Farah Karim-Cooper (chair) is a Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London, and Head of Higher Education & Research at Shakespeare’s Globe. Farah is also the President of the Shakespeare Association of America, and is a General Editor for Arden’s Shakespeare in the Theatre series and their Critical Intersections Series. She is the author of Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh University Press, 2006, revised ed. 2019) and The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (Arden 2016) and has recently co-edited a special issue of the Shakespeare journal on ‘Shakespeare, Race, and Nation’.