HWS News
7 October 2024 "Querying and Queering the White Other in Shakespearean Drama"
Shakespeare scholar will speak on racial identities in Shakespeare’s work for this year’s Peter Cummings Memorial Shakespeare Lecture.
Award-winning author and Associate Professor of English at Trinity College Dr, David Sterling Brown will discuss what he defines as the “white other” in William Shakespeare’s plays during his talk 'Querying and Queering the White Other in Shakespearean Drama' on Wednesday, Oct. 9.
The talk will be held at 7 p.m. in the Blackwell Room and is free and open to the public. The annual lecture, hosted by the English and Creative Writing Department, brings Shakespeare experts to campus.
Brown is the author of Shakespeare’s White Others (Cambridge University Press 2023), which was acquired by Tantor Media and recorded as an audiobook, with Brown as narrator. A member of the Race Before Race Executive Board, Brown also sits on the editorial boards for Shakespeare Survey and Shakespeare Bulletin; and he is a member of the American Shakespeare Center’s Board of Trustees and he is a member of the American Globe Center’s working group. He has published numerous peer-reviewed and public-facing essays and delivered myriad talks. His most recent article explicates James Baldwin’s 1964 essay “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare”; and this provocative scholarly article, published in Transformative Works and Cultures, is open access and available to the public.
Patricia Akhimie, the director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, writes in her endorsement of the book, “Brown's much needed study powerfully and persuasively demonstrates how the policing of whiteness within Shakespeare's plays recruits and reproduces antiblackness at the heart of early modern English culture.”
In 2021, Brown received a prestigious Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship that facilitated his residency with Claudia Rankine’s The Racial Imaginary Institute, of which he is a full-time Curatorial Team member. The Fellowship also facilitated the development of his professional website (www.DavidSterlingBrown.com) and his virtual-reality art gallery and exhibition—“Visualizing Race Virtually”—that complements Shakespeare’s White Others. Rankine, a New York Times bestselling author and another endorser of Brown’s book, defines Shakespeare’s White Others as a “brilliantly bold” text that “seamlessly blends genres while reimagining the scholarly monograph mode.” Brown, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, holds a bachelor’s degree with honors in English literature from Trinity College and a master’s and doctorate from New York University in English and American literature.
Last year at HWS, Stephen Guy-Bray, a professor of in the department of English language and literatures at the University of British Columbia who specializes in Renaissance poetry, queer theory and poetics, spoke at the first Peter Cummings Memorial Shakespeare Lecture, named in honor of the late Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature Peter Cummings P’92.
Cummings taught at HWS from 1970 to his retirement in 2008, with his most popular courses on Shakespeare and leading study abroad programs to Bath, England. He was published widely on Shakespeare and other poets, in addition to writing some 700 sonnets of his own with nearly 100 published. In 2007, he received multiple prizes at the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets competition, which focuses on poets who write in a narrative or formalist style. Cummings passed away in 2014.
