Institute to Host Shakespeare Birthday Lecture

Ania Loomba, Professor of English from the University of Pennsylvania, will give the 2007 Shakespeare Birthday Lecture at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon at 4pm on Friday 27th April.

Professor Loomba’s talk is entitled ‘Shakespeare and the Wider World’.  She will be discussing the ways in which Shakespeare plays were shaped by worlds far away from England and how they represented these worlds to English audiences.

She says, ‘I will be suggesting that some of Shakespeare’s most compelling characters and most profound representations of human relationships deal with cultural, geographic or racial differences and how Shakespeare draws on older traditions of storytelling and older histories to craft these images, which help us to reflect on cross-cultural relations in the present day.’

Ania Loomba is Catherine Bryson Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and is an expert in early modern English literature, culture and postcolonial literature and history.  She researches and teaches about the histories and literatures of race, colonialism, gender, and nation-formation from the sixteenth century to the present, Shakespeare and other early modern English dramatists as well as contemporary postcolonial literature.

The Shakespeare Birthday Lecture will take place at 4pm on Friday 27 April at the Shakespeare Institute, Church Street, Stratford-upon-Avon.  Entry is free.

Ends

Notes to Editors

Based in Mason Croft, an eighteenth-century house with gardens and grounds in the centre of Stratford-upon-Avon, the Shakespeare Institute gives its students the friendliness of being part of a close-knit academic community while offering the academic resources needed for specialist postgraduate work on the drama of the English Renaissance.

For further information

Kate Chapple, Press Officer, University of Birmingham, tel 0121 414 2772 or 07789 921164.