Ben Tilghman Lunch Seminar

On Friday January 27th at 12 PM, MEMSI will host Ben Tilghman, Professional Lecturer of Art History at GW. Lunch will be served. The event takes place in Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St. NW). His paper, "The Enigmatic Nature of Things," will be available two weeks in advance. Please email Lowell Duckert [lduckert@gwu.edu] to RSVP for the event and receive a copy.

Ben Tilghman’s research focuses on the art of medieval Europe, especially illuminated manuscripts and the early medieval British Isles. He is particularly interested in the symbolic aspects of ornament, the visual nature of writing, cross-cultural interchange in the North Sea basin, and phenomenological and object-oriented analyses of art. He has recently published essays in Word & Image and in the volume Insular and Anglo-Saxon: Art and Thought in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Colum Hourihane, and also has forthcoming essays in Manuscripta and The Journal of the Walters Art Museum. Before coming to GW, he previously served as the Zanvyl Krieger Curatorial Fellow at the Walters Art Museum, where he curated exhibitions on miniaturization in books and art, the Saint John’s Bible, and images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Ecological Movement

GW MEMSI and the Graduate Program in English are pleased to announce "Ecological Movement," a panel to be held at GW next semester.

Come join us on Friday February 24th at 5:30 PM in Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St. NW).

Our presenters cut across time periods and disciplines. Each will give a short paper, with a general Q&A to follow. Speakers include:


Stacy Alaimo is Professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she has won several teaching awards and has served as co-chair of the University's Sustainability Committee. Her primary interests are the environmental humanities, animal studies, posthumanism, science studies, new materialism, gender theory, cultural studies, and multicultural American literatures. She has published two books recently: Material Feminisms (edited with Susan J. Hekman, 2008) and Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010). A book entitled Sea Creatures and the Limits of Animal Studies: Science, Aesthetics, Ethics is currently in the works. Please see her research page for more information.


Lowell Duckert is a doctoral candidate in the GW English program, finishing his dissertation on early modern waterscapes, actor-network theory, and ecocriticism. He has forthcoming articles on glaciers, the color maroon, rain, and Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana. Along with Jeffrey Cohen, he is editing a special issue of the journal postmedieval titled "Ecomateriality."


Jennifer James, Associate Professor of English and Director of African Studies Program at GW, specializes in African American literature and culture, with a concentration in the 19th century. She has a particular interest in theorizing the relationships among literary praxis, representations of blackness, and sociopolitical violence. She is working on two projects: Black Jack: Andrew Jackson and African American Cultural Memory, which traces the history three generations of ancestors enslaved by the President, and a cultural history of a little-known labor riot staged by black American miners during the “nadir.” A short list of her scholarship includes: “What Guano is Made of: Race, Labor and Sustainability ” (forthcoming, special topic issue of American Literary History on sustainability and American literature) and “Ecomelancholia: Slavery, War, and Black Ecological Imaginings” in Environmental Criticism for the 21st Century (eds. Stephanie LeMenager, et. al., 2011).

Eileen Joy is Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Her main interests are Old English literature, cultural studies, embodied affectivities, ethics, and the post/human. She has published on many topics: Beowulf, suicide terrorism, and Emmanuel Levinas; historical artifacts and cultural memory; the Anglo-Latin Wonders of the East and the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, India; the intellectual history of early modern bibliography; and much more. She is the co-editor of The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook (2007), Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (2007), and postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. Her current research/writing project is on the Anglo-Latin and Old English Lives of Saint Guthlac and the queer erotics of unsettled inter-subjectivities, along with a monograph tentatively titled Postcard from the Volcano: Beowulf, Memory, History. You can also find her blogging on In the Middle and organizing future events for the BABEL Working Group.

GW Today Interviews Professor Holly Dugan

The Memory of Smell

In her new book, Assistant Professor of English Holly Dugan investigates the influence of olfaction in early modern England.

Nov. 7, 2011

By Julia Parmley

The scent of mothballs and wet concrete may not be the most glamorous of smells.

But for Assistant Professor of English Holly Dugan, they conjure powerful, poignant memories of her late grandmother.

“I think we’re hard wired to associate smell with memory,” she said. “Smell is one of the most direct and unmediated sensory mechanisms.”

The memory of smell—and its role in everyday life—is a topic Dr. Dugan delves into in her new book “The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England.”

The book looks at six scents—incense, rose, sassafras, rosemary, ambergris and jasmine—and their role in important cultural spaces of the time period, including churches, royal courts and pleasure gardens. For Dr. Dugan, the point of The Ephemeral History is to show what smell can reveal about life back then and how it hints at changes to come.

“Perfume is such a loaded object of study because we have so many assumptions about what it is, how it functions and who uses it,” she said. “It was fun to look back and see that before it was a commodity, it had all these other implications for culture, religion, politics, sexuality, religion and discovery.”

“The Ephemeral History” was based on Dr. Dugan’s graduate school dissertation on the role of smell in England’s playhouses and texts, but the idea to investigate smell first was born after a reading of William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” where she noticed “tons of really gross jokes about smell.”

“I started reading old medical texts to learn about what smell meant during that time, and then began to look into smell of playhouses and metaphorical references to smells in London’s sewer systems and neighborhoods.”

Dr. Dugan found herself intrigued by differences in the uses and descriptions of smell. “I found the question of what life was like in the past really fascinating, and I think my research delves from that curiosity,” she said.

Her research continued in England and France, where she read about smell in London’s Museums of Health and Medicine and visited a perfume museum in Versailles. She immersed herself in what she calls “literature for the senses,” which at times revealed personal glimpses into the lives of early modern Englishmen and women.

“Literature for the senses—particularly olfaction—is a tremendous historical archive because you don’t just get description of scent but the phenomenon of experiencing it,” said Dr. Dugan. “Partly what I love about the early modern England time period is that the literature gets at personal experience that is also related to broader, shared stories about the culture.”

Dr. Dugan also found “weird, enormous amounts” of recipes in old cookbooks about how to perfume leather gloves, which “clued me in to how prevalent and important fragrance was in early modern life.”

In France’s perfume archives, Dr. Dugan was able to smell essential oils that were commonplace in early modern England perfumes. Ambergris, a substance produced in the digestive system of sperm whales, now usually only exists in modern day fragrances as a synthetic version.

“Actual ambergris oil and the synthetic version smell totally different,” said Dr. Dugan. “I got to sniff the essence of musk, civet and all heavy animal smells that don’t on their own smell good, but combined with other layers make great perfumes. That added another dimension to the book—what smells we can encounter from the past and what can be lost forever.”

The tender, familial role of sassafras was another surprising discovery for Dr. Dugan.

“I would read these moving descriptions about how people would make cradles out of sassafras wood because they believed that the scent would protect their babies from the devil,” she said. “It was a powerful smell.”

“The smells I thought would be the keys to perfume were not always the smells that in the past were the most poignant for their culture and for that cultural moment,” she added.

Other prevalent scents included jasmine in pleasure gardens and rosewater in the court of Henry VIII. Dr. Dugan discovered the king gave away more than 27 different bottles of distilled rosewater to his mistresses, which she said were made out of imported damask roses. These gifts gave Dr. Dugan a bit of insight into the king’s emotional life.

“When we gift perfume, it’s often a reflection of a beloved’s sense of his or her lover, but I think what Henry VIII was doing was saying, ‘Here’s a bit of me; I wear this and you can now wear this and through smell you are marked as mine,’” she said. “So in the book, I explore what olfactory references are associated with the court and what they mean. The Tudor rose is a powerful icon that signals royal lineage and I think the rosewater allowed King Henry VIII to apply that idea in a three-dimensional way.”

Dr. Dugan also came across unusual words that described smells at the time. Her favorite is “smeek,” which refers to something that both smokes and smells.

“There was a whole language to describe smells,” she said.

Dr. Dugan, who came to GW in fall 2005, called her position in the Department of English a “dream job.”

“The number of well-known faculty who have become my colleagues is sort of mind-blowing, and I found over the first year that I really loved teaching in Washington, D.C.,” she said. “I share the same passions that many of my students have about why they came to GW—it’s just an amazing place to learn.”

Dr. Dugan currently teaches an introductory course in Shakespeare and a graduate course on the space of the stage in early modern England. For both courses, Dr. Dugan utilizes the District’s cultural offerings—the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Folger Shakespeare Company and the Kennedy Center, among them—as well as multimedia in her classroom.

“There are all these great things that I’m showing in class and I’m learning alongside students,” she said. “We’re working together to figure out what these plays mean now. It’s been really fun.”

A recipient of a 2011 Bender Teaching Award, Dr. Dugan said the recognition is more reflective of the strength of George Washington’s Department of English as a whole.

“Most of what I do in the classroom I learned from my colleagues, so that award shows how lucky I am to be surrounded by really great teachers and really great students,” she said.

Dr. Dugan did not plan to pursue teaching as a profession until she went to college and discovered “a world of ideas” she never wanted to leave.

“I always say the classroom is a total utopian space,” said Dr. Dugan. “Utopia isn’t really achievable but the reach is there in that space, and in college I first discovered that.”

Although her book is on store shelves, Dr. Dugan is still pondering the significance of smell. She remembers a few years ago, on a crowded sidewalk in New York City, passing a woman whose coat smelled like mothballs. Dr. Dugan turned around and followed the woman for a few blocks, her mind filling with memories of her grandmother.

It’s these kinds of unexpected moments, she said, that reveal how powerful smell can be.

“I wasn’t consciously thinking that ‘mothballs equal grandma’ but in that moment I was instantly 10 years old, rooting through her closet for something,” said Dr. Dugan. “That’s what I think is so interesting about smell—I think the brain works in myriad ways to foster those connections, the meanings of smell in our lives.”

“My book tries to tell that story in a scholarly way, but it ends with thinking about that relationship of what the body is hard wired to do and how the meanings that we accrue over time show the spaces we’ve been and the places we’ve touched,” she added. “Strange things can happen just beneath perception.”

GW Today Interviews Professor Alex Huang

The Global Influence of Shakespeare

Associate Professor of English Alex Huang co-founded a video archive of worldwide performances inspired by the Bard’s works.

Nov. 28, 2011

With just a click of your mouse, you can travel to Brazil to view “Othello,” watch “Hamlet” in Egypt, attend “King Lear” in England, or see India’s take on “A Midsummer’s Night Dream.”

This virtual field trip is courtesy of Global Shakespeares, a free, open-access video and performance archive of 300 and counting Shakespeare and Shakespeare-influenced productions and clips from around the world.

“It’s sort of a YouTube for Shakespearians and theater and film enthusiasts, but with much better stability and scholarly foundation,” said GW Associate Professor of English Alex Huang, co-founder of the archive.

A Shakespeare scholar, Dr. Huang created the archive along with Peter Donaldson, Ford Foundation Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and fully launched it online in 2010. He came to George Washington in 2011 from Pennsylvania State University, where he taught for seven years.

The performances highlighted on Global Shakespeares can bring a breadth and depth to understanding the Bard and his work, said Dr. Huang.

“Great ideas transcend historical and cultural boundaries and can be articulated in many different forms and languages,” he said. “Shakespeare lends himself to translation—many directors believe that Shakespeare in translation is more effective, more sexy and spicy than in his original text.”

Dr. Huang added the cross-cultural interpretations can challenge assumptions about Shakespeare’s most famous plays. “Encountering these plays through refreshing performances in new contexts can reinvigorate our dulled senses,” he said. “Shakespeare in translation doesn’t take away from the Bard. Instead, it makes his work more relevant to a worldwide audience.”

The video archive first began 10 years ago as a collection of tapes from field research trips in Dr. Huang’s office at Stanford University, where he earned a doctorate in comparative literature and a joint doctorate in humanities. As his collection grew, colleagues began requesting the videos to expose their students to Shakespeare performances from around the world.

Mailing the tapes back and forth quickly became unmanageable and new technologies for the production and distribution of digital video were rapidly becoming more accessible to educators, so Dr. Huang decided to bring the collection online.

“I thought, ‘Why don’t we take advantage of what is available technologically today, and really transform digital video to make it an integral part of the study of Shakespeare performance and a project to promote cross-cultural understanding?’” he said.

Global Shakespeares has been recognized as a valuable research source for scholars. It has been reviewed in major journals and newspapers, including Shakespeare Quarterly, the British Shakespeare Association’s Shakespeare and Asian Theatre Journal. The archive has also been indexed by the Modern Language Association’s bibliography, World Shakespeare Bibliography and other scholarly databases.

Each video on Global Shakespeares is posted with permission, is thoroughly researched and properly annotated, and contains subtitles when needed, said Dr. Huang.

Faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Boston University; MIT; and universities in the United Kingdom, China, Switzerland, Korea and Brazil are using the project in their courses.

Analytics show Global Shakespeares has visitors from more than 88 countries—and these visitors used more than 55 languages to access the site, which features a dynamic map on which users can plot the trajectory of a touring production, interactive historical timeline, tabbed browsing and a variety of search options.

“You can find Shakespeare in places you might not even think of,” said Dr. Huang. Almost every continent is represented on the site, including Asia, South America and Europe.

One of the most interesting aspects of Global Shakespeares is that users can view the same play performed in different countries to see firsthand how different cultures interpret and perform pivotal scenes.

One example is a scene from Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, “Titus Andronicus,” where Lavinia, Titus’s daughter, is raped and her hands and tongue are cut off. How should actors perform this scene on stage?

“If you do it literally, you run the risk of diminishing Shakespeare’s tragedy into parody. Too much violence can become comical and it’s unreal,” said Dr. Huang. “Too little and you fail to convey the weight of the tragedy.”

One director from Japan had a solution. Director Yukio Ninagawa used red silk streamers to portray blood flowing from Lavinia after the attack.

“It’s beautiful and eerie at the same time,” said Dr. Huang. “This is one example of how different interpretations can transform our understanding of the play.”

There are also performances on Global Shakespeares that challenge widely accepted interpretations of Shakespeare’s better-known plays. For “The Merchant of Venice,” Dr. Huang said plays from Japan and China focus more on the question of justice in a capitalist society and Portia—the beautiful heiress disguised as a male lawyer—than on Shylock and anti-Semitism, a theme that post-Holocaust and particularly post-9/11 Western versions usually emphasize. The play is often retitled “The Woman Lawyer,” “A Bond of Flesh” or “A Pound of Flesh” in Asia.

And Dr. Huang noted “Othello” is a study of jealousy in many countries—and not of race. “Shakespeare as a global author has taken many forms since the building of the Globe in London,” said Dr. Huang.

“That’s the blind spot that our traditions can cast on us,” said Dr. Huang. “When you look at Shakespeare in a global context you realize Shakespeare is much more capacious and profound and plays a very important role in the cultural life today.”

Global Shakespeares is not only a cultural resource but also a teaching one. Using VITAL—Video Interaction for Teaching and Learning, a video-centric course management system connected to Global Shakespeares— Dr. Huang’s students use performances on Global Shakespeares to create their own video clips and illustrate their own interpretations. Dr. Huang teaches two Shakespeare courses in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences this semester.

“With VITAL, students play the role of a curator with films and video clips by critiquing them, circulating their film essays and commenting on one another’s video collections and essays,” said Dr. Huang.

“Once they make their first video clip, they’re hooked,” he said, adding that VITAL allows students to “slow down” by defamiliarizing the plays. “When students experience a speech such as Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ in radically new performance styles or in a foreign language, they can approach it without prejudice or learned reverence,” he said.

Dr. Huang, a member of GW’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies in the Elliott School of International Affairs, holds a position as a research affiliate in literature at MIT. He is widely published in the field of Shakespeare and early modern studies and has appeared on a number of media outlets, including the BBC, to talk about the fields of digital humanities and global Shakespeare. In spring 2012, he will be a fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Although many Shakespeare scholars prefer more traditional productions, Dr. Huang said the more creative, out-of-the-box interpretations of Shakespeare plays are actually the ones that end up revealing the most about the Bard.

“The reason Shakespeare is still alive today is because he’s able to thrive in so many different environments,” he said. “No other playwright from any other culture has this ability.”

Students Took to the Stage in a Debate about The Tempest

[By Tori Kerr, GW English major]

With the Republican debates taking up most of media’s attention in the month of November, it seems fitting that GW should have its own debate—only, this one wasn’t political. Students from both Prof. Holly Dugan’s and Prof. Alexander Huang’s Shakespeare classes took to the stage in a debate concerning the protagonist of The Tempest—the topic was: “Resolved that Prospero genuinely pardons his foes and is a model of true forgiveness and reconciliation.” Does he truly forgive his enemies or is it all an act? Four students from each class formed arguments complete with opening statements, rebuttals, and closing remarks.

I entered the event with my own opinion, which was that Prospero was certainly no model for forgiveness. I must admit, however, that the negative team had an advantage in the wording of the prompt: can a debator argue that any person, not only Prospero, is a model of “true” forgiveness? As the negative team pointed out, that would be like arguing that Prospero is Christlike; even on the cross, Jesus pardoned his enemies. It was this tricky word “true” that the negative team utilized in order to formulate their argument.

I knew the debate would get heated among the participants, but I didn’t expect to feel so excited just as an audience member. The argument quickly transformed from animated to passionate and then to fiery. Members of the opposing teams talked over each other, threw out sassy rebuttals and even waved fingers in the air to punctuate their speeches. While this sort of frenzy might not be acceptable for the GW Mock Trial team, state courtrooms, or the Republican preside ntial candidates, it made for a surprisingly exciting debate on The Tempest. I didn’t expect to enjoy the debate as much as I did. The debators’ energy clearly showed that Shakespeare’s plays were not written for only 16th century audiences—his themes are timeless. Revenge and forgiveness are topics for debate that will endure as long as humans (and politcal campaigns) do.

Graduate Teaching Assistant Molly Lewis for Prof. Huang's class was also impressed by both teams' performance. She wrote:

"The impassioned debaters were allowed an opening and an additional statement (both followed by cross examinations by the opposing team), as well as a rebuttal at the end of the debate. These vibrant “back and forth”s elicited strong reactions from their audience members, who eventually had to vote for which debate team they agreed with. In the end, though, many actually abstained from voting, a true testament to how well both debate teams performed."

Video Highlight

How to Make a Human, December 1 & 2

Please join us on Thursday December 1 and Friday December 2 for two events centered around critical animal studies.

On Thursday December 1 we will hold a symposium on Karl Steel's important new book How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Ohio State University Press, 2011). The book is available for $40 in hardcover via Amazon, and $10 for an e-version on CD. If you plan to attend, please try to read the book ahead of time. The symposium features Julian Yates, Peggy McCracken and Tobias Menely, as well as Karl Steel. The event will take place from 4-6 PM (note change of time) in GW's Academic Center, 801 22nd St NW, Rome Hall 771. The symposium is free and open to all who wish to attend. It will be followed by an informal vegetarian dinner. The cost is $15 exclusive of beverages. If you would like to join us for dinner, you must register by Tuesday November 29.

Friday December 2 at noon is the date of our last seminar of the year, on Critical Animal Theory, with all the guests from the previous night's symposium speaking about the field. You do not need to attend the Thursday symposium to participate in the Friday seminar. Some short readings will be distributed ahead of time. Lunch will be served. If you would like to attend, you must reserve a spot and secure the readings by emailing Lowell Duckert (lduckert@gwu.edu) no later than Tuesday November 29. If you RSVP please come: we pay for every lunch reserved, and it is a shame when people hold a spot but do not attend the seminar.

Meet our presenters:

Karl Steel is Assistant Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where he specializes in medieval literature, intellectual history and social practice, and critical animal theory. How to Make a Human joins his impressive list of publications on animals, including an article written for the new collection Shakesqueer (2011) and a thematic issue of the journal postmedieval (co-edited with Peggy McCracken) called "The Animal Turn" (2011).


Peggy McCracken is Professor of French and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Her areas of expertise include medieval French and Occitan literature, gender and sexuality, and women's studies. Her most recent book is The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature (2003). She is currently writing two books: one on Marie de France and the other on animality and embodiment.




Tobias Menely is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University, focusing on such diverse topics as eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, animal studies, climate and weather, time, and ethics and community. He recently published an article for the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies: "Sovereign Violence and the Figure of the Animal, from Leviathan to Windsor-Forest" (2010). Right now he is finishing his book, The Community of Creatures: Sensibility and the Voice of the Animal.


Julian Yates is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware. His areas of expertise are medieval and Renaissance British literature, literary theory, material culture studies, and ecocriticism. His latest book is Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (2003), and he has published extensively on all things post/human: for instance, "Counting Sheep: Dolly does Utopia (again) (2004) and "It's (for) you; or, the tele-t/r/opical post-human" (2010).

Korean Tempest a Success

[By Alex Huang]

Co-sponsored by the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, the Korean Embassy, and other units at GW, and co-organized by new GW English professor Alex Huang and colleagues in History, EALL, and Anthropology the Korean Tempest event was a huge success this weekend, with over 100 people from the community and GW in the audience. The renowned Korean director and playwright of over 60 original plays Mr. OH Tae-suk visited GW and spoke at the colloquium on Saturday, November 5, to shed light on his methods of artistic creation and his vision for The Tempest. The filmed version of the performance in Edinburgh was screened in the Elliott School of International Affairs on Friday, November 4. Oh's Tempest won the prestigious Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh International Festival this year (August 2011).

Oh's Tempest (Mokwha Repertory Company) opened with a bang with a storm scene that transported Shakespeare's The Tempest to 5th century Korea. Prospero's book of magic transformed into a multi-colored magical fan which he handed over to the audience at the end of the play. Caliban became a two-headed monster (played by two talented actors in one robe) who is sawn apart. Oh adopts a remarkably light, fun approach to a play that has routinely been politicized in postcolonial discourses and to the volatile political situation in the two Koreas today.

Video highlights are now available online with English subtitles:

The amazing storm scene with drum beats

Ferdinand "reborn" as a pillow

Two-headed Caliban separated by Prospero into two creatures

The editor of Shakespeare Quarterly and Folger Shakespeare Library research division director Dr. David Schalwkyk gave brilliant opening remarks, and GW English professor Alex Huang introduced the film on Friday and gave a talk on global Shakespeare on Saturday.

Students who attended the event were impressed by the deep baritone drums and turbulent music. They wrote: "The stage bursts forth with color and white robed dancers elegantly gesticulating with beautiful white pieces of cloth." The audience, they said, was treated to "a jarring visual portrait of the stormy opening scene." They were fond of the Caliban as two-headed monster (or Siamese twin) "consisting of a normal-sized man and his 'little brother,' a figure of diminutive stature. By giving Caliban two heads, Oh Tae-suk gives added depth to the character that can now converse with itself and have two separate personalities. In Shakespeare’s original play Caliban maintains several child-like features and has been molded by Prospero’s teachings as a child. Oh maintains the child-like aspects of Caliban within the smaller Siamese twin, often referred to as “Little Brother.”

MORE VIDEOS

David Schalkwyk's opening remarks

Master Oh's talk translated by Ah-jeong part 1

Master Oh's talk translated by Ah-jeong part 2

Master Oh's improvisational performance of pansori (traditional Korean opera) at dinner

Ah-jeong's talk on Oh Tae-suk's Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, part 1

Ah-jeong's talk on Oh Tae-suk's Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, part 2

Ah-jeong's talk on Oh Tae-suk's Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, part 3

Alex's talk on Oh's The Tempest

Film Screening and Roundtable: Anonymous

[By Alex Huang]

Graduate students in English and students in Prof Alex Huang's and Prof Holly Dugan's Shakespeare classes were treated to a pre-release screening of Roland Emmerich's controversial new film "Anonymous" on Tuesday, October 25 by Sony Pictures at the Regal Theatre Gallery Place in downtown DC. "Set in the political snake-pit of Elizabethan England," the film--with Shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi in the prologue--proposes that the Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere was the author of Shakespeare's plays. Along the way, the film dramatizes "cloak-and-dagger political intrigue, illicit romances in the Royal Court, and the schemes of greedy nobles hungry for the power of the throne were exposed in the most unlikely of places: the London stage."

Following the event, a roundtable was organized by Prof Huang on November 3 to combat the propaganda machine set in action by the film. In attendance were graduate and undergraduate students in English, Professor Jonathan Hsy, Alex Huang, and Holly Dugan. Among the topics discussed were the social expectations and resistance of "geniuses," Hollywood's penchant for "conspiracy" and scandals, and--most importantly--how to set historical facts straight.

"Anonymous" calls to mind such films as Miloš Forman and Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. But there is one thing even undergraduates and non-specialist audiences do not buy. The film presented a very unconvincing picture of literary production. In the whole of early modern England, no one other than the Earl could write good poetry, and "Shakespeare," Jonson, and Marlowe stumbled over one another to beg (or threaten as the case may be) de Vere for an uninterrupted supply of manuscripts (which acts peculiarly as drugs). The film also misled the audience to assume that no other companies or performance venues mattered in Shakespeare's time.

The good thing that can come from "Anonymous" is that it can lead people to the real tour-de-force that is James Shapiro's fine book Contested Will (http://www.amazon.com/Contested-Will-Who-Wrote-Shakespeare/dp/1416541624), Records of Early English Drama (http://www.reed.utoronto.ca/), Early Modern London Theatres online (http://www.emlot.kcl.ac.uk/), and other vetted sources for further study.

Debating The Tempest 11/10

Debate on The Tempest: 6 pm, 11/10 (Thursday) in Funger 210

Topic: Resolved that Prospero genuinely pardons his foes and is a model of true forgiveness and reconciliation.

Debate teams from Prof. Alex Huang's and Prof. Holly Dugan's Shakespeare classes.

Questions: contact acyhuang@gwu.edu

Merchant of Venice Conversation 11/14

From Jenna Weissman Joselit, GW Judaic Studies:

In conjunction with The Merchant of Venice production and class that I'm team-teaching with Leslie Jacobson in TRDA, the law school will be holding a conversation next Monday, November 14th, at 3 p.m. in the Burns Faculty Conference Center (B505) of the law school, between Dean Paul Schiff Berman and Barry Edelstein of New York's Public Theater on the legal implications of the play. The conversation will be moderated by The New Republic's legal affairs editor and GW law professor, Jeffrey Rosen. It promises to be quite a lively occasion.

Korean Tempest @ GW 11/4

FILM SCREENING: The Tempest

Adapted and Directed by Oh Tae Suk

Film of an Award-winning Korean Performance with English Subtitles

4-6 pm, Friday Nov. 4, 2011

Harry Harding Auditorium, Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E St, NW

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

GW MEMS Contribute to SIY

The Shakespearean International Yearbook

Volume 11: Special issue, Placing Michael Neill. Issues of Place in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture

• Imprint: Ashgate
• Illustrations: includes 7 b&w illustrations
• Published: November 2011
• Edited by Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop, Alexander C. Y. Huang, and Jonathan Gil Harris

Updated MEMSI Events ... and More

We look forward to welcoming you to the panel "What Monsters Mean" with Asa Simon Mittman and Jeffrey Weinstock on Thursday October 27 at 4 PM (1957 E Street NW, Room 213). All are welcome to this panel presentation and open discussion; no RSVP is required. More information here:
http://www.gwmemsi.com/2011/10/what-monsters-mean-1027-1028.html

On Friday October 28 at 12:15 PM (please note slight change of time), we will hold a seminar for students and faculty on "Monster Theory." Lunch will be served. If you plan to come, you must RSVP to Lowell Duckert (lduckert@gwu.edu) by Tuesday October 25 to receive the readings and reserve a space. Please read the pre-distributed essays before you come, and if you do RSVP, please attend.

On Thursday December 1 we will hold a symposium on Karl Steel's important new book How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Ohio State University Press, 2011). The book is available for $40 in hardcover via Amazon, and $10 for an e-version on CD. If you plan to attend, please try to read the book ahead of time. The symposium features Julian Yates, Peggy McCracken and Tobias Menely, as well as Karl Steel. The event will take place from 4-6 PM (note change of time) in GW's Academic Center, Rome Hall 771.

Friday December 2 at noon is the date of our last seminar of the year, on Critical Animal Theory, with all the guests from the previous night's symposium speaking about the field. You do not need to attend the Thursday symposium to participate in the Friday seminar. Some very short works will be distributed ahead of time. An email requesting an RSVP will be distributed next month, and lunch will be served.

AND, mark your calendar for these spring events:

Friday January 27 12 PM

Lunch seminar with Ben Tilghman (GW, Art History), "The Enigmatic Nature of Things" (precirculated essay)


Friday February 24 5:30 PM (note change of time)
Symposium on "Ecological Movement" with Stacy Alaimo, Eileen Joy, Jennifer James and Lowell Duckert. Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St NW)


Friday April 13 9 AM
Breakfast seminar with Danna Agmon (University of Michigan), “Striking Pondichéry: Religion and Labor Disputes in an Eighteenth Century French Colonial City.” Introduced by Leah Chang (GW, French).


The spring semester will also feature a symposium on translation organized by Alex Huang and Jonathan Hsy. Stay tuned for details.

What Monsters Mean: 10/27 & 10/28

Plan to attend two monstrous MEMSI events right before Halloween. Two authorities will visit us to discuss what monsters mean:

Jeffrey Weinstock is Professor of English at Central Michigan University. His areas of expertise are popular culture, American literature, and literary criticism. Publications include Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women as a Form of Social Protest (Fordham University Press, 2008), in which he examines the differences in ghost stories told by male and female writers. Other interests are vampires, "gothic" music and culture, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.


Asa Simon Mittman is Associate Professor of Art History at California State University, Chico. He has written and co-written several books and articles on the subject of monstrosity and marginality in the Middle Ages, including Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (Routledge, 2006). He is also the president of MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application) and co-director of the Digital Mappaemundi, an extraordinary resource that changes the ways we study medieval maps and geographic texts. He is currently working on articles on Satan in the Junius 11 manuscript, the Franks Casket, and images of Jews on medieval world maps.

Join us for both events if you can:

Thursday October 27 at 4 PM, 1957 E St. NW Room 213

Professors Weinstock and Mittman will lead "What Monsters Mean," an informal discussion of the cultural significance of monsters from the medieval period to the present day. The event is open to all who wish to attend.

Friday October 28 at 12 PM, Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St. NW)

GW MEMSI and the English Graduate Student Association (EGSA) are co-sponsoring a seminar on monster theory. Both professors will discuss selections from the work as well as the contours of the larger field. This lunchtime seminar is open to all interested faculty and graduate students, but you must pre-register with Lowell Duckert to receive the readings [lduckert@gwu.edu]:

1. Selections from Jeffrey Weinstock, Vampires: Undead Cinema. Wallflower Press's "Short Cuts" series. Forthcoming 2011.

2. Asa Simon Mittman and Susan Kim, "Anglo-Saxon Frames of Reference: Spatial Relations on the Page and in the World," Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art, vol. 2 (2009), with Susan Kim.

3. Asa Simon Mittman, "Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies," Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman, with Peter Dendle (London: Ashgate, January 2012).

See you later this month!

Fall Semester Events

GW MEMSI is co-sponsoring some fall semester events that might appeal to you.

To prepare for Halloween, two monstrous events to attend. "What Monsters Mean," an informal discussion of the cultural significance of monsters from the medieval period to the present day by two experts in the field, will take place on Thursday October 27 at 4 PM at 1957 E St. NW Room 213. The event is open to all who wish to attend and features:

• Jeffrey Weinstock, Central Michigan University
• Asa Simon Mittman, California State University at Chico

On Friday October 28 at noon in Rome 771, GW MEMSI and the English Graduate Student Association (EGSA) are co-sponsoring a seminar on monster theory. Jeffrey Weinstock and Asa Simon Mittman will discuss selections from their work as well as the contours of the larger field. This lunchtime seminar is open to all interested faculty and graduate students, but you must pre-register with Lowell Duckert to receive the readings (lduckert@gwu.edu).
November 4-5: As part of Staging Korea: Korean Theatre in Search of New Aesthetics, a day-long event celebrating the beauty of Korean performance traditions, scholars and directors will discuss the internationalization of Korean theatre.

This year's highlight is the visit of Master Oh Tae Suk from Seoul and the screening of the film of his production, The Tempest, which won the Herald Angel’s Award at the 2011 Edinburgh International Arts Festival. The screening is on November 4 at 4 p.m.; the audience will have an opportunity to interact with the director at a presentation on November 5. Both events at the Harry Harding Auditorium, 1957 E Street. The events are part of this year's Hahn Moo-Sook Colloquium in the Korean Humanities. This event is co-sponsored by MEMSI and co-organized by Professor Alex Huang.

Thursday December 1 4-6 PM in Rome 771: a symposium on Karl Steel's new book How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages. Responses from:

• Karl Steel
• Julian Yates
• Peggy McCracken
• Tobias Menely

The symposium will be followed on Friday December 2 by a lunchtime seminar in Rome 771 on critical animal theory, co-sponsored with the GW English Department's 19th Century Studies cluster. Details of both these events will be circulated soon.

Finally, please mark your calendar for Friday February 24, when MEMSI and the Graduate Program in English will sponsor a symposium on Ecologies featuring Stacy Alaimo.

Jessica Frazier Breakfast Seminar 10/7

Come join us for our first breakfast seminar of the year on Friday, October 7th. Jessica Frazier, doctoral candidate at GW, will discuss her paper called "Re-Orienting the Diamond: India, the Transnational Jewel Trade, and the Early Modern Theater.” A light breakfast will be served. We meet at 9AM in Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St NW).

Her paper is pre-circulated ahead of time to allow for a fruitful conversation. Please RSVP to me [lduckert@gwu.edu] and I will send you a copy.

Jessica recently participated in an NEH seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library this summer: "Shakespeare: From the Globe to the Global." We posted her recollections earlier this month.

See you on the 7th!

Jessica Frazier on "Shakespeare: From the Globe to the Global"

by Jeffrey Cohen

The GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute is proud of our graduate student affiliates. They give us many good reasons to brag! Recently we highlighted Nedda Mehdizadeh's inclusion in an NEH seminar on Re-Mapping the Renaissance. Very few graduate students are admitted to each NEH seminar, and so we take it as a sign of Nedda's great promise that she was invited to enroll.

But she is not the only GW graduate student to have been offered a place in a seminar. This summer Jessica Frazier was accepted to participate in “Shakespeare: From the Globe to the Global” at the Folger Shakespeare Library. It was my pleasure to compose a letter of endorsement for Jessica in which I wrote:

Jessica has been auditing my course on “Objects, Agency, and the Constitution of Life.” I treasure her presence in the seminar: she brings to the readings, both in theory and in primary texts, an eye attentive to the complexities of narrative and material detail. Her queries to her fellow students in the class advance our discussion exponentially. She can always be counted upon to make cogent connections among disparate works and to keep bringing the conversation around to how goods (especially clothing and jewelry) circulate within international networks of trade and prestige. This class has been my favorite seminar in 16 years of teaching, thanks in no small part to Jessica’s contributions ... Jessica’s dissertation excavates the global narratives behind clothing and luxury items, especially as these objects materialize contemporary interchanges between west and east. Jessica is especially interested in Oriental costumes worn on stage and in public: how the sartorial speaks identity; how the hybridity of English body in Eastern dress functions socially (what it disrupts, what it enables); how costume adornments like diamonds speak stories that cross national boundaries and intermix the foreign with the domestic; how novelty of dress and of self performance might function in a world where the ambivalences of colonialism already had a long history; how aesthetics might be a cross-cultural phenomenon. Notably, Jessica is interested at looking at contact zones from both sides: not just how the orient arrives in England, but what travels from the west into the east. Her research is nuanced, interdisciplinary, and innovative. One day it will be published as an outstanding book.

Now wonder then, Jessica writes the following report of her summer at the Folger. Congratulations, Jessica, on your achievement!

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As the spring semester came to a close, I received word that I would have the opportunity to participate in an NEH Institute entitled “Shakespeare: From the Globe to the Global.” A few months earlier, I had begun to outline the direction of my dissertation project: an exploration of fashionable early modern objects and their movement through transnational networks. Thus, I had been drawn to the questions that were to guide “Shakespeare: From the Globe to the Global.” How did the Shakespeare of the London Globe Theater become a global enterprise? And how did the global inform the productions of the Renaissance English Globe? As the Institute organizers wrote so eloquently in their “Dear Colleague” letter, “How did Shakespeare emerge from an early modern London that was increasingly aware of an expanding world to become a singular voice and an icon of empire and Englishness, the most significant representative of a globalized literary culture, and the most popular playwright of the non-Anglophone world?” This was a conversation in which I very much desired to take part, and a conversation that I sensed would open up novel avenues for the project on which I was embarking. As I discovered, I was not to be disappointed.

Hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library and directed by Professor Michael Neill (Professor Emeritus at the University of Auckland), the Institute followed a rigorous five-week course of study, beginning with an inquiry into the perception of the global in Shakespeare’s England and ending with an examination of Shakespeare as both a tool of British colonialism and as a mechanism to speak back to an imperial system. Each week brought leading scholars in the fields of English, history, and film and media studies to serve as guest facilitators. The early weeks of the Institute dealt directly with my area of study, and I acquired new perspectives on mercantile encounter in the period. As the weeks progressed, “Shakespeare: From the Globe to the Global” led me into less familiar, but equally valued, terrain, as I learned of contemporary, international cinematic productions of Shakespearean plays. During this latter portion of our study, Professor Neill challenged us to consider what makes these adaptations “Shakespearean”? This question now informs a film assignment on my syllabus this semester for “Introduction to English Literature.”

As one of three graduate students in the group, I was perhaps not entirely prepared for the kindness and spirit of camaraderie with which I was met by the other participants, many of whom are experienced professors. From them, I garnered encouragement and advice about both the dissertating process and academic life post-graduate school. But perhaps most importantly, they provided me with much insight about being a teacher. Teaching strategies, discussion techniques, and graded assignments that I am currently incorporating into my classroom bear their mark and influence. I know that the professor that I am becoming is and will hopefully continue to be inflected by my fellow participants’ gracious commitment not only to scholarship but also to their students. Professor Neill, the staff of the Folger, the Institute participants, the guest scholars—all of these components contributed to a summer that has helped to shape the path of my scholarship and the course of my profession. I am so grateful for it.

~ Jessica Roberts Frazier

Digital Inquirers: GW MEMSI Welcomes GW Professor Alexander Huang and Folger Director Michael Witmore

We're overjoyed that two new scholars have entered the GW MEMSI community this fall semester:

1) Alexander Huang, GW Associate Professor of English, specializes in Shakespeare and globalization (especially Asia), Shakespeare and performance, and digital humanities. He is also Research Affiliate in Literature at MIT and General Editor of the Shakespearean International Yearbook (since 2010). As co-founder and co-editor of Global Shakespeares, an open-access digital video archive based at MIT, he recently served as the video curator of an exhibition on early modern and postmodern Sino-European cultural exchange at the Folger Shakespeare Library. His research is more than just plugged-in: if you have not visited Global Shakespeares or his personal website yet, do so immediately. Professor Huang has been busy and abroad this summer; he gave a talk at the Edinburgh International Festival, "All the world's a stage," that touched on touring theatre, festivals in 21st century cultural life, Shakespeare's global career, King Lear, and The Tempest. He then conducted interviews for the televised BBC 2 Review Show and for "Classics Unwrapped" on BBC Radio Scotland. During these programs, he discussed global Shakespeare, the Edinburgh International Festival, and what's at stake in performing Shakespeare today. What's more, the GW Hatchet just published an interview with him, "Bringing Shakespeare to Life." Please welcome him personally at a GW MEMSI event this academic year.

Recent Publications

Alexander Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (Columbia UP, 2009), winner of the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, an honorable mention of NYU’s Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre, and the International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS) Colleagues’ Choice Award

Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace, co-edited by Alexander Huang and Charles Ross (Purdue UP, 2009)

2) Michael Witmore, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and newly-appointed Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. His research interests include Shakespeare, early modern intellectual history, and the history of materialism. He directs the Working Group for Digital Inquiry, a group of humanists who use computers to assist in traditional humanities research such as mapping the prose genres of Early English Books Online (EEBO). Take the time to navigate his blog, Wine Dark Sea. His most recent publication, Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare (Norton, 2010), was inspired by a painting in the library he now directs. You can read more about this work and his exciting new tenure in a Folger interview. We hope to have Professor Witmore headline an event for us in the near future.

Please welcome these two renowned scholars and "digital inquirers" to the GW MEMSI community!

Suzanne Miller Lunch Seminar 9/9/11

The first GW MEMSI Seminar of the 2011-12 year will feature the work of Suzanne Miller, an assistant professor in the History Department at GW. Her essay "Cycles of Violence and Penance: Crafting the Narrative of Venice's Adriatic Empire" is available for circulation immediately. Please email Lowell Duckert (lduckert@gwu.edu) to obtain a copy of the paper and to RSVP for the seminar.

We meet in Rome Hall 771 (Academic Center, 801 22nd St NW, Foggy Bottom Metro) on Friday 9/9 promptly at noon. A light lunch will be served. The seminar is a conversation about precirculated work in progress, so please arrive having read the essay and ready to give feedback and join the conversation.

In order to ensure that there is enough food, you must RSVP to Lowell to attend; if you do RSVP, please do come.

Professor Miller's interests include the intersection of politics and cultural production, the construction of authority, and cross-cultural encounter. Her current research focuses on colonial endeavor and foreign rule within the medieval Mediterranean. Read more here.

We look forward to seeing you on the 9th!

For the record ...

... we would settle for the .5 in that 113.5.

We're cheap, and easily made happy.