Shakespeare’s Imagined Orient: An International Conference

The American University of Beirut is hosting a three-day conference on Shakespeare’s Imagined Orient.

Speakers include Jonathan Burton (West Virginia University), Jerry Brotton (Queen Mary, University of London), Jonathan Gil Harris (George Washington University), Gerald Maclean (University of Exeter), Margaret Litvin (Boston University), and Daniel Vitkus (Florida State University).

Shakespeare studies has recently experienced a noticeable and dramatic geographical shift. As the textual landscape of Shakespeare’s drama changes, it takes on new forms and now points to new horizons, namely the East and the Orient, and more particularly the Levant. From the blasted heaths of England, Shakespeare moves to the most arid and yet fertile soils of the Levant. The aim of the conference, in this emergent field, is to reconsider Shakespeare’s diffusion from both Pre and Postcolonial Middle Eastern perspectives and to examine Shakespeare’s critical relevance to understanding religion and politics on both a local scale (in the Middle East/the Orient) and globally.

Submissions concerning the following range of topics:

– Representations of the Orient in Shakespeare’s work
– Christian/Muslim representation/interaction on Shakespeare’s/the early modern stage,
– Local/global Shakespeare (from a Middle Eastern perspective),
– Shakespeare’s women and the Orient,
– Desire, Phantasm, and the Orient,
– Identity and nationhood,
– Material culture and the imagined Orient on Shakespeare’s stage.