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Sharanya Sridhar, PhD candidate in the Early Modern and Renaissance program, was recently awarded a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant by the UMass Graduate School. She will be using the financial support to spend a few weeks in the British Library studying Tamil translations and adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. 

Sridhar's dissertation takes a transnational, transhistorical approach to Shakespeare studies by focussing on post-Independence Tamil adaptations. The British Library alone houses 204 Tamil translations and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays ranging from late nineteenth-century to mid twentieth-century. By bringing into visibility regional texts that have largely remained untouched within Shakespeare studies, this dissertation aims to supplement this critical work of expanding, challenging, and rewriting Shakespeare’s canon.