Shakespeare in American Education, 1607-1934: A Conference at the Folger Shakespeare Library, March 16-17, 2007

FAIN: RZ-50543-06

Folger Shakespeare Library admin by Trustees of Amherst College (Washington, DC 20003-1004)
Edwin Williams (Project Director: November 2005 to April 2008)

A conference investigating the historical role of Shakespeare in American classrooms. (12 months)

The Folger Institute Center for Shakespeare Studies will sponsor a conference investigating the historical role of Shakespeare in American classrooms. Based on original, commissioned research, this conference will define a new field of investigation that draws on the expertise of Shakespeareans, Americanists, and historians of education and rhetoric. Speakers will identify and investigate the critical moments and conditions under which Shakespeare’s plays entered the American curriculum. The scope of papers will encompass a range of classrooms (from secondary to university), time periods, and regions. Collectively, conference participants will construct revised and revitalized histories of the role of Shakespeare in American education.

Associated Products

Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance (Book)
Title: Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance
Editor: Mimi Godfrey
Editor: Coppélia Kahn
Editor: Heather S. Nathans
Abstract: Shakespearean Educations examines how and why Shakespeare's works shaped the development of American education from the colonial period through the 1934 Chicago World's Fair, taking the reader up to the years before the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (popularly known as the GI Bill), coeducation, and a nascent civil rights movement would alter the educational landscape yet again. The essays in this collection query the nature of education, the nature of citizenship in a democracy, and the roles of literature, elocution, theater, and performance in both. Expanding the notion of "education" beyond the classroom to literary clubs, private salons, public lectures, libraries, primers, and theatrical performance, this collection challenges scholars to consider how different groups in our society have adopted Shakespeare as part of a specifically "American" education. Shakespearean Educations maps the ways in which former slaves, Puritan ministers, university leaders, and working class theatergoers used Shakespeare not only to educate themselves about literature and culture, but also to educate others about their own experience.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/shakespearean-educations-power-citizenship-and-performance/oclc/605017673
Primary URL Description: WorldCat listing
Secondary URL: http://www2.lib.udel.edu/udpress/shakeseducations.htm
Secondary URL Description: Publisher's listing
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9781611490282

---