Sujata Iyengar to Deliver Annual Shakespeare Lecture on September 13
Same-Sex Star-Crossed Lovers in Global Shakespearean Web-Series is the topic of this year’s George Washington University 2019 Annual Shakespeare Lecture, to be delivered by Dr. Sujata Iyengar (University of Georgia).
Please RSVP
Friday, September 13, 2019 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM with a reception
Post Hall, GW’s Mt Vernon Campus
2100 Foxhall Road NW Washington, DC 20007
Shakespeare’s legendary star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet have crossed time and space in the twenty-first century to emerge as same-sex couples in streaming web-series from Brazil, India, and the U.S.A. This lecture considers the changes that these film-makers, amateur and professional, make to the story and the power of streaming video to create new and culturally relevant adaptations of Shakespeare.
This lecture investigates the ways in which the tropes of parental disapproval and barriers between lovers (conventional in opposite-sex romances) are used to defuse the still-shocking portrayal of same-sex love.
Dr. Sujata Iyengar, Professor of English at the University of Georgia, is the author or editor of Shakespeare’s Medical Language; Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body; and Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
With the late Christy Desmet, Dr. Iyengar co-founded and continues to co-edit the online, peer-reviewed, multimedia, scholarly journal Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, which won First Prize in the “Best New Journal” category from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (2007).
A winner of the Special Sandy Beaver Award for Excellence in Teaching and of Fellowships from the Office of Service-Learning and the Office of Online Learning at UGA, Dr. Iyengar has developed experiential, interdisciplinary, and service-learning courses, including courses for the State Botanical Gardens and local elementary, middle, and adult education classes.
