Join us for the opening of the fourth Shakespeare and Race Festival, which marks the launch of a new research collaboration between Shakespeare’s Globe and King’s College London: The Shakespeare Centre London.

This two-day symposium will see a range of presentations on the topics of Shakespeare, Race, and Poetics. Join academics from around the world as they 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’ works.

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?

Join us online or in-person as we explore these questions and more, with keynote speakers Professor Nandini Das (Oxford University), Professor Joyce Green MacDonald (University of Kentucky), Professor Dennis Britton (University of British Columbia), and Professor Jane Grogan (University College Dublin).

Please note that the Symposium will take place at Shakespeare’s Globe on 4 November (in-person only), and at King’s College London on 5 November (online or in-person tickets available).