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We are delighted to announce our newest faculty member joining the Department of English in the fall 2017 semester. Marjorie Rubright will be the new Director of the Renaissance Center as of Fall 2018.

Marjorie Rubright is a specialist in Shakespeare and English Renaissance literature and culture. She teaches courses on Shakespeare, dramatic comedy, and cultural identity in early modern England and feminist and ethnic-studies approaches to Renaissance literature. She is currently working on a book project titled A World of Words: Language, Globalization, and the English Renaissance, which traces Renaissance connections between ideas of linguistic evolution and ideas about the evolution of the earth, as posited by the emerging science of geology. What she calls “Renaissance geo-linguistics” argues that linkages between geology and etymology were forwarded to explain the racial and ethnic origins of Europeans.

In the fall semester, in addition to teaching a section of our survey, Early British Literature and Culture, she will be teaching English 391SG: Shakespeare’s Global Afterlives, which will combine the study of Shakespeare’s plays with re-creations of them in contemporary culture, from novels to The Simpsons. She writes, “What makes Shakespeare such a global phenomenon? Throughout this course, we will read four Shakespeare plays paired with instances of their afterlives in performance (film, television, theater) and print (novels, plays, poetry, essays, comics). Along the way, we’ll consider how Shakespeare’s plays imagined global cultural exchange in the Renaissance context and, in turn, how they have been revitalized through adaptation and cultural translation to raise new questions about what it means to think globally today. A sample of our readings include: The Tempest with Margaret Atwood’s recent novel The Hag-Seed, Aime Cesaire’s play A Tempest, and Robert Browning’s poem ‘Caliban upon Setebos’; Othello with the film O and Toni Morrison’s play Desdemona; Hamlet with the mythical performance aboard the Red Dragon ship in 1607, Suleyman Al-Bassam’s The Al-Hamlet Summit, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and The Simpson’s Hamlet. Assignments will encourage creativity and experimentation, as well as short close readings. You may be invited to: draft a single scene of your own screenplay; write a witty or cantankerous review of a film adaptation; explore what is lost in translation when we edit Renaissance texts for contemporary readers; to mock-interview a character from a play in an effort to discover their untold backstory; visually map the real and imagined geographies of a play.”