Throughlines, with Ayanna Thompson and Ruben Espinosa

How can educators effectively incorporate discussions about race into the study of Shakespeare and other premodern texts in the college classroom? Barbara Bogaev speaks with scholars Ayanna Thompson and Ruben Espinosa about Throughlines, a pedagogical resource developed by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University. This free online tool offers professors a variety of accessible teaching materials for incorporating premodern critical race studies into their teaching. Specifically designed for use in higher education, the materials include lectures, syllabi, and activities on a unique and expansive range of topics that will continue to grow.

>>Explore Throughlines, a free online resource for the college classroom at throughlines.org

Espinosa and Thompson share their experiences teaching Shakespeare in diverse higher education settings. Their conversation underscores students’ need for open dialogue and provides practical strategies for navigating these discussions. They offer valuable insights for experienced professors and those new to teaching, highlighting the value of integrating premodern critical race studies into studying Bard’s works and other literature and history.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

Ayanna Thompson is a Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University and Executive Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Thompson, an influential Shakespeare scholar, is the author of many titles, including Blackface and Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars. She is currently collaborating with Curtis Perry on the Arden4 edition of Titus Andronicus. Thompson’s leadership extends beyond the university, serving on the boards of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Play On Shakespeare, and Folger Shakespeare Library. She is a Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at The Public Theater in New York. In 2021, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ruben Espinosa is the Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and a Professor of English at Arizona State University. He is the author of many titles, and most recently, Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism. He is the current President of the Shakespeare Association of America, and he serves on the Editorial Boards of Shakespeare Quarterly, Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory, and Palgrave’s Early Modern Cultural Studies series. He is working on his next monograph, Shakespeare on the Border: Language, Legitimacy and La Frontera.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published September 9, 2024. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production, including editing the transcript, from Paola García Acuña. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Previous: Juliet, Then and Now, with Sophie Duncan

Next: Will Tosh on the Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare

BARBARA BOGAEV: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Barbara Bogaev.

Race has become a crucial critical lens for teaching Shakespeare. But some English professors may feel like they don’t have the right training to address race in the classroom.

That’s where Throughlines comes in. It’s a new, free online resource center designed for college instructors. Throughlines has essays, videos, even whole syllabus with ideas for how to talk about race in Shakespeare’s works and those of other early modern writers. It’s a project of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and it comes out of their Race B4 Race project. It’s led by my guests today, Ayanna Thompson and Ruben Espinosa.

They’re both professors of English at Arizona State University, and Ruben is the president of the Shakespeare Association of America.

————————–

Bogaev: Hi, nice to meet you, Ruben.

Ruben Espinosa: Great to meet you.

Bogaev: And Ayanna, it is so great to talk with you again.

Ayanna Thompson: It’s such a pleasure to talk to you again.

Bogaev: I want to start with you. I enjoyed a short video you made for the website that addresses the topic just straight on. So, perfect place to start: how to talk about race in the classroom. First, why do you feel the need to make a primer on this?

Thompson: Well, it turns out that most of us aren’t trained in this, especially if we’re Shakespeare scholars. Surprise, surprise!

I was thinking back to the origin of wanting to make Throughlines, and I remembered when I was an undergraduate, 30 plus years ago now, that my Shakespeare professor said something like, Shakespeare would never have known anyone who was not English and would not have known any jews and definitely no blacks.

Bogaev: Going straight to Shakespeare jail.

Thompson: I just thought that was so funny because since he was writing plays about them and he’s named his theater, The Globe, that didn’t make any sense to me, but I was an undergraduate, so I just took it for what it was worth. It took a while for me to find the scholarship that already existed about race in Shakespeare’s time from, scholars like Elliot Tokson and Eldred Jones and Margo Hendricks, Kim Hall, Anthony Barthelemy, and of course, Imtiaz Habib.

I realized that there’s all this scholarship that existed and now, you know, 30 plus years later, there are even more amazing scholars who are doing this incredible archival work, but that there was no way to help people introduce this into their teaching. And that even if they were interested in bringing up topics about race in their Shakespeare classrooms, that they might not have had the resources for that.

They may not have ever taken a class about race in general, or how to talk about race, so I just thought there’s this gaping hole for educators who teach in colleges and universities about introducing race into their premodern classes. And I just thought, I can do something about this. Let’s get all these amazing scholars together to share their tips on how to teach.

So, my little intro video about introducing race in the classroom is really about destigmatizing it and saying that the professor doesn’t have to be the expert and that it is a space where people can try out ideas, in a, like, you know, non-heightened moment, the classroom is that non-heightened moment, You can make mistakes and they don’t follow you for life. That’s how we all learn, right, by making mistakes and being corrected—so really kind of like basic 101 about taking the fear off of the professor and also empowering the students since they don’t feel like they have to be perfect all the time either.

Bogaev: Yeah, they are basics, but they’re not that basic, especially this one about how you, the teacher, are not the expert.

Thompson: Yes!

Bogaev: I would think that that kind of, that doesn’t land as easily for a lot of people. Ruben, I was wondering what kinds of experiences you’ve had in the academy that made you think, oh my gosh, hold on, scholars really do need some help addressing sensitive topics like race and Shakespeare.

Espinosa: Whenever presenting at conferences or giving talks—you know, when I was in Texas, we would do these large talks for Humanities Texas—the responses would often be, I want to do this but my students are majority white, or I want to do this but… there was always the apprehension going into it.

I think by and large, you know, there was a clear desire. For many to broach the topic, it’s just not really knowing how to go about it. So, in many ways, the videos and the materials we have on Throughlines, you know, gives these starting points so that people hopefully will feel less apprehensive about starting.

Bogaev: Well, right. The reason I wanted to talk about the basics is because we’re in such a polarized moment. It’s hard to talk about anything sensitive in a nuanced way. Ayanna, I’m thinking, given that did you face any pushback in the process of putting this together or raising the funding for it?

Thompson: Surprisingly, no. We did make sure that, you know, we approached everyone at our institutions and our funding agency, and all that we got was full-throated support about how important it is for higher education, the future of humanities, diversifying our pipeline. So, it’s been wholly supportive which is wonderful in this, as you say, very polarizing time.

Bogaev: Well, Ruben, maybe I should ask you this: what kinds of  conversations did you have, as you were putting it together, about the content? What mix were you going for?

Espinosa: Yeah, the idea was to present pieces that are legible to broader audiences. Our approach was always—I think, as academics, we’re trained in particular ways of communication, right?, and used to conference presentations, right?—our approach with the scholars was to say this is you speaking to a colleague and saying, “Hey, when I teach Hamlet, this is what I do” because these are the kind of conversations we want. We wanted to feel less intimidating in terms of the content but, you know, still accessible for students. I think that’s incredibly important within the moment, as you suggest, this polarizing moment, for us to feel that not only our colleagues can access this, but honestly, our students can access these videos and engage with these materials and in a way that feels accessible and non-threatening.

Bogaev: Oh, that’s interesting. So it’s almost as if you were all at a conference together, and students attended too, and what you might talk about at the water cooler relating to race. Does that kind of speak to it?

Espinosa: I think that, yeah, that’s a good assessment. Honestly, these are how these conversations transpire. I mean, when I first met Ayanna, it was just honest conversations about the academy, honest conversations about the classroom, and I think what we saw is a large number of scholars of color who had similar experiences and sharing that. So, it grew into a community that we knew we had a system of support within the academy, and now, it feels so enlivening that this is now pointing outward in such a big way.

Thompson: We aim to, we thought about Masterclass as like, you know, here’s this for-profit thing that looks really glossy and beautiful and people are very excited about, nd we were like, what could we make for the academy that looked that good and was free?

Bogaev: Oh my God, that’s just a knife-edge question.

Thompson: Barbara, you might not know this, and probably many of our listeners won’t know this, but there is very little research about how professors change their teaching.

Bogaev: Huh.

Thompson: Or their syllabi or their curricula.

Bogaev: You just throw them to the lions it sounds like.

Thompson: Exactly. We are trying to not only put this material out there, but then collect some data about how people change their habits, which is knowledge that, you know, the academy needs going forward.

Bogaev: Okay, well, Ruben, how do people integrate the material into their existing syllabi? Because there are only so many new professors who, you know, are a blank slate. Everybody else is working off a template.

Espinosa: That’s right. I think our idea was to recognize that we know your syllabus is already cramped, right? How do you present this material? How do you integrate it? I think a lot of the material on our platform is showing how to broach these topics without having to exclude the material that X professor might find incredibly important to their own research, to their own interests.

It’s a matter of recognizing some of these moments in the plays, or various works, I should say, of literature, not just plays, but not ignoring the moments where there are, you know, there’s attention to difference, there’s attention to race, there’s kind of casual racism, right? Students will pick up on that and often they won’t be bold enough to ask a question about that racist moment, right? And so, I think this shows how to broach those topics and how to address them within the classroom without necessarily revamping your syllabus altogether.

We’re not necessarily pushing people to say your syllabus should be focused on race, but rather if you want to integrate this when teaching X, Y, or Z, this is one way to go about it. I think the fact that we have so many different scholars and different approaches is so incredibly rich because even though it might be about one particular work of literature you can think about mapping that on to various works, and those strategies, I think, work across the board.

Bogaev: Yeah, and you also suggest teaching assignments and teaching techniques. I’m looking right now at the material, some of the material you authored, Ruben, and you suggested an assignment that you’ve used in the classroom involving students making short films which is great. You posted some of your students’ films, and the one about deaths at a party in Juarez used quotes from Macbeth. It’s pretty wild. Maybe, can you describe it for us?

Espinosa: Yeah, the assignment’s fairly straightforward, you know. I asked them to take a scene from Shakespeare, adapt it into a five-minute video that addresses a contemporary social issue that they are interested in, that is important to them. They have poetic license over the way that they want to structure this and I leave the parameters fairly loose for that reason. And I have been, I mean, floored at times by what students are able to produce.

The video that you mentioned was produced by my students at the University of Texas in El Paso that sits on the US-Mexico border. You can see Juarez from the UTEP campus. These students were producing this at a time when there was some horrific violence in Juarez. It was the deadliest place on earth during that moment, right? The average was eight murders per day, sometimes in incredibly gruesome ways. A lot of our students are transfronterizos, which means they cross over, they would cross over to attend school. So this kind of trauma, right, is clearly resonating with them. The haunting in Macbeth, these students used that as the impetus for thinking about the way that violence in Juarez haunts them.

What I found brilliant is their engagement with Shakespeare and recognizing how the expectations of linguistic identity in El Paso also haunt them. They are really working with that theme all on their own, Barbara. I mean, I should say, I’m not leading them in this direction.

I’m hoping that, you know, the material that I’m assigning in class is leading them to think about what that language means, but certainly not guiding them and saying “you should do a video on this.” Sometimes, they come up with these brilliant, brilliant adaptations. Even if they don’t, even if groups treated it lighthearted, which they have done, when they showcase these videos at the end of the semester, they always get to see at least one video that is impactful and meaningful and shows the range of Shakespeare. I mean, for me, that’s as good as it gets, I think, you know, and seeing what the value of Shakespeare is to them, right?

Bogaev: Yeah, and just visually, this student is walking through the streets and it’s intercut with newspaper footage of that party and what happened there. This is a scene of horror, there are quotes from Macbeth, and eventually, the student sees actual ghosts, haunting, he’s traumatized.

Espinosa: Yeah, that’s right. They changed the language, you know, once they are in the classroom and the student is only Spanish speaking and one of the other students scoffs at that, right? She says, you know, under her breath, of course, like, of course, you’re answering in Spanish. And so this disdain for the language, but in those moments, there is no translation for the viewer. I think they are trying to also register how alienating it might feel when you don’t know the language. If you don’t speak Spanish, you’re on the outskirts, right? And so when he gives the tomorrow speech, all of that’s in Spanish.

[Student from University of Texas in El Paso speaking in Spanish]

“Mañana, y mañana, y mañana,

entra al paso lento del día día,

hasta la última silaba del tiempo registrado;

y todos nuestros ayeres han iluminado

ilusos al camino de la muerte polvoroza.

¡Apágate, apágate vela breve!”

Espinosa: I think locally that really hit hard for our classrooms and for our students listening to the poetics of Shakespeare in a different language that was home to them in many ways.

Bogaev: Yeah, that makes it your own. What did your students say about how this kind of classwork changes their understanding of the play?

Espinosa: Yeah. I will say, you know, when Ayanna mentions that you’re not the expert in the room, I definitely did not feel like the expert because when I first started this assignment I said you have to adhere to Shakespeare’s original language.

I will say the videos were very different. And to my students credit, they called me on it. You know, after any major assignment like this that I’m trying out I always ask for student feedback. So, you know, at the end of the semester, I said, what could have gone better? What could I have done better? What could change about this? The majority of students said, “It would be great if we could adapt it into modern English.”

I tried that out and immediately once they were untethered from Shakespeare’s language it made a huge difference. Some students have experience in making film, right, in editing, and so those will come across as most polished, but even some of the ones that are less polished, I appreciate their engagement with the social issues—you know, issues of LGBTQ rights, for example. One set it up like a Jersey Shore reality show for Twelfth Night, you know, thinking about Viola and same-sex desire. At the end of it, in Spanish, the student was calling their mother and was going to come out like on the next episode, right? It’s just a clip of the student on the phone calling their mother and explaining that she’s a lesbian and it’s this moment, I think, that’s the cliffhanger, right? but also coming to terms with the kind of cultural expectations in that background in the Latinx community. It wasn’t a highly polished film, there was nothing exceptional about the videography in it, but the content was exceptional. I think that’s also incredibly important for the conversations in the classroom.

Thompson: And also like how well they understand the Shakespearean text to be able to make something that resonates with them and the issues that are important to them. So, I mean, I think it’s like teaching five different languages at the same time. It takes someone like Ruben who’s highly responsive to his students and saying “I’m not the expert in the room” to allow that kind of flowering and growth and knowledge to occur.

Bogaev: Yeah, not easy. Ruben, you also have an essay about teaching Henry V by encouraging students to think about nationalism and ethnocentrism and xenophobia and immigration, all of which comes up in that play. So maybe I’m kidding myself but don’t these themes naturally come out in discussions of it at the college level?

Espinosa: They do. I think a lot of people would say that. But there is a large portion, I think, of our colleagues who probably don’t foster those conversations. So even if recognized, it is very much historically situated, right, in thinking about English nationalism without thinking about the way that nation building works. So that’s what I’m trying to tease out.

I should be clear. I’m very site-specific, right? I teach on the US-Mexico border. I am here in the US Southwest. So, some of these issues resonate more clearly with our students here, right? I think this is also being mindful of what your students are encountering and what they’re not encountering. This is not to say this should not be taught outside of the US-Mexico border, but it’s also a way in, right? If you’re not about these issues, you should be thinking about how notions of US citizenship are imagined in the present moment. And it’s hard not to. I mean, it’s hard not to look at the RNC and see mass deportation now and chants of send them back. Our students are aware of that, be it in El Paso, be it in Chicago, you know, wherever they might be. And so, I think it’s just an opportunity to have those conversations.

Bogaev: Really interesting. Ayanna, you have another video on the site that I really enjoyed about starting a Shakespeare course unit by teaching Titus Andronicus.

Thompson: It’s my favorite!

Bogaev: Oblique strategy! And you call Titus a gateway drug to a lifelong love of Shakespeare.

Thompson: That play is a gateway drug! I think, you know, most of our students, if they’ve come to our college classrooms having encountered any Shakespeare, it’s not going to be Titus. It’s going to be…

Bogaev: Oh, that’s for sure.

Thompson: Right, right. I like that because there’s so much baggage and pretend knowledge about Shakespeare that if you start off with Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet it’s often very difficult to get the students to do true, critical, close reading and analysis because they think they know what it’s about.

But with Titus, they’re thrown into this bonkers play and it requires them to actually read closely. This is a skill that no one is born with, you have to be taught it. I’m always like, you know, it’s okay that you don’t understand it, it’s 400 years old, there’s no reason for you to be able to understand it, but that’s the point of us working through it together.

This crazy play that has rape and mutilation and racism and a biracial baby? What? 1592 and a biracial baby? Yes! And I will say I get emails from students 10, 15 years later that will be like “I just saw something about Titus online and I thought about you and that amazing discussion we had.” For them that becomes the most impactful thing because it was so unfamiliar and then encouraged them and enabled them to do this close reading and analysis—skills, which, you know, those of us teaching in the humanities think is the real payoff of whatever text we’re teaching.

Bogaev: Well, we are laughing, but there is extreme violence and extreme sexual violence, as you said. Do you get any students who protest that it’s triggering?

Thompson:  I never have in my 20 plus years of teaching. I’ve never had one student protest. I think it’s because I frame it in such a way to say that the material is objectionable, that there’s room for everyone to be offended and horrified and that’s the point, and that we should be able to enter into those moments and unpack them and understand how they existed in the 16th century and how they resonate with us in the 21st century. And the students, by and large, women, men, you know, non-binary students, many of whom have experienced sexual violence, I think encounter it wholeheartedly. They go into it willing to discuss and debate. They don’t ever have to open up about what their own personal experiences are. I think it’s a moment that shows them that the college classroom will be radically different than the high school classroom.

Bogaev: Wow, yeah. So, it’s all about framing, which is really what the website addresses.

Thompson: It’s all about framing. You named it.

Bogaev: Ruben, do you teach Titus?

Espinosa: I have taught Titus, but with much less skill than Ayanna, so.

Thompson: That’s not true! That’s not true! He’s such a good teacher I cannot tell you! I’m so honored to be his colleague. I’m not blowing him up here. He’s amazing.

Bogaev: I think we’ve already gotten a glimpse of that, yes. Ruben, do you find yourself using some of these techniques that Ayanna’s explaining?

Espinosa: I do. I think that, you know, part of what Ayanna mentions in recognizing how objectionable the material can be is important to put on the table at the onset. Where she might not have had experiences with students pushing back or questioning, I’ve had uncomfortable experiences with students questioning why is it all we’re talking about, you know, is race in this play. There’s so much more. There’s Shakespeare’s language, right, etc. Those are situations that I had to navigate over time. But Ayanna’s right. Titus holds so much and it’s so exciting and crazy. I think what I can glean from much of what she’s suggesting is important, I think, what we should all do is recognize how to address the perception of Shakespeare as being the end-all be-all, and instead, allow students to be able to look at him with a critical eye, right?

Thompson: Also, the other thing that I think we model, and all the scholars on Throughlines model, is that you can invite your students to do that critical analysis and still love the work. You know, we’ve devoted our lives to these premodern materials that most people don’t read. We love it, but love does not preclude, you know, deep, honest engagement. And in fact, that’s what true love is, as Farah Karim-Cooper wrote in her new book, right? Like, if you’re going to engage with this, that is the true act of love, seeing the thing that you love with clear eyes. I think that’s what we model for our students, and that’s what the scholars on Throughlines model as well.

Bogaev: But to pick up on what Ruben was just saying, Ayanna, is there still resistance to teaching Shakespeare in this way with an emphasis on, say, race or some of these other issues? People who come in and say, no, it should be taught at the level of language and plot and poetics as it has been historically.

Thompson: It’s all of those things. I teach plot, poetics, race, rhetoric. I also teach through performance because they weren’t written to be read on the page, they were meant to be on a stage. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.

Bogaev: Have you been challenged this way?

Thompson: Of course, especially early in my career when I was younger. Now I look old, so they’re more intimidated, but…

Bogaev: And by they, what are we talking about? Administrations in the academy or…?

Thompson: No, no. I’ve never had, I’ve been, you know, really fortunate to work at institutions that have supported my work wholeheartedly. I’ve never had pushback from colleagues or administrators, but occasionally there’ll be a student who’s like “why are we talking about this?” And, you know…

Bogaev: Like Ruben has faced.

Thompson: Yeah, but not often, I’m going to say not often. And frequently in my student evaluations, they’ll, students will say things like “I came thinking that I was just going to learn Shakespeare, but I learned so much more, and that’s why this was my favorite class.” So I think they get the sense of love through deep engagement that I’m trying to model for them.

Bogaev: Ruben, is there any one or are there several essays that opened your eyes to an approach or an interpretation of Shakespeare that you hadn’t thought of before?

Espinosa: I’m not exaggerating when I say all of them. The material is so, so incredibly rich. I’m thinking particularly, you know, Ian Smith’s pieces on Throughlines are pretty amazing,

Bogaev: He is amazing.

Espinosa: He is amazing. He talks about the cliché of race with such clarity through Twelfth Night, right. He has the ability to point to moments that you’ve read probably 20 times before and not seen the thing, so when he talks about the captain’s virtue at the opening of Twelfth Night, right, and Viola trusting the captain seemingly because of his fairness, his whiteness as it were, like “You, you’re somebody I can trust,’ he’s thinking about you can’t judge a book by its cover but that’s what we’re asked to do, and obviously the opposite side of that coin is to think about darkness as something that you can’t trust, that is not virtuous. It’s a well-known trope in the Early Modern period historically that we know about but maybe had not seen it in that play. So once we come to that play again I’m hoping that anybody who watches that video will recognize that and will address that with students because I think it’s so important. Similarly with race and Hamlet, the violent black man myth, it’s again this real attention to how these predominant tropes that we have in the present are taking shape back then. I think he’s a great example.

Maddie Sayet’s work on the Indigenous Shakespeare movement is also very, very rich. Opening with the idea that when we think about Shakespeare in Japan, when we think about Shakespeare in Mexico, we envision Japanese characters, we envision Mexican characters. But when we think about Shakespeare in America, the default is always white, right? And we don’t think about the indigenous population.

I think if you’re asking, are they eye opening? Yeah, a lot of them. When we were making this, I have to say over and over again, I was like, this is, I’m already changing the way I’m thinking about my classes and we’re not even getting started, we’re barely beginning at this point. I’m very, very excited about this and curious to see how others react to this. Already the feedback we’ve gotten has been positive. People saying, “I’m changing up my syllabus because of this.”

Bogaev: Oh, that’s so cool. Ayanna, which of the entries on the website really hit you hard?

Thompson: He’ll think that I’m just saying this to embarrass him, but actually, Ruben’s video about teaching Henry V moved me to tears at the end. I thought, oh my gosh, this is exactly the kind of conversations that our students long for. They long to understand Shakespeare and the world they’re living in now. They long to be in a space where you can talk about the thorniest issues in a non-heightened environment.

Bogaev: What specifically—at the end?

Thompson: Yeah, when he was talking about, you know, he goes through the Fluellen moments about wearing the leek and how he’s kind of being challenged for his Welshness and then someone coming to his aid saying you mock this at your own peril because this is what we need to kind of become the idea of Great Britain going forward and just like who we consider part of us, part of our society and who we consider as outside of that society—

Bogaev: The us and them conversation.

Thompson: Mmhmm. The us and them conversation and wherever that is, you know for him, it was on the US-Mexico border, but it could be anywhere, right? I just felt that that was like such an impactful way of teaching that play that is both true and honest to the play, true and honest to the 21st century that we’re living in.

I did want to emphasize something that Ruben said that, you know, Throughlines is not done It is a dynamic site and we are going to keep adding scholars and activities and syllabi and ways to change our teaching for the next several years. We’re hoping that people will keep coming back because there will be more content coming.

Bogaev: You anticipated my next question—whether there’s a follow up to this? It is specifically designed for college classrooms. Is someone interested in doing something like this for high school, or are you going to expand it for high school?

Thompson: We, you know, we feel that we have expertise in colleges and not necessarily in high school, so I would welcome a copycat from someone to do it for high school teachers.

Bogaev: There is a call out there!

Thompson: Yeah, the thing about the way that we work as scholars is that we want more people to step up to the plate. We don’t think of it as a zero-sum game. So, I would love it. I would really honestly love it if someone would take up this charge and do it for high schools.

I think that we’re curious about what can change the dial in premodern classes in higher education. But I also think someone else could do the work on thinking about it for high schools, though much of the material can be used by high school teachers if they feel comfortable.

Bogaev: Yeah, certainly. I am thinking, though, of anyone listening who’s a high school teacher and thinking “Oh, I’d love to do this, but where would I ever get the money?” We keep on hearing about cuts to the fine arts and classical curriculum in the academy. I mean, how do you get such bucks for such a classy looking website?

Thompson: Well, we have been generously funded by the Mellon Foundation and that has enabled us to hire a crackerjack team of multimedia specialists and then obviously all the scholars that we’ve paid for to give us their knowledge and expertise. So yeah, we’re very, very fortunate.

Bogaev: Well, you guys, I wish you the best with it. Thank you so much for it. I have so much reading to do now and video watching, and I wish you both the best.

Thompson: Thanks so much.

Espinosa: Thank you, Barbara.

————————–

BOGAEV: Ayanna Thompson and Ruben Espinosa are the executive director and director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Throughlines is free and available to all at throughlines.org.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical assistance from the studios of KJZZ in Tempe, Arizona, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. We had web production help from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

If you have a moment and you’re so inclined, please do leave us a review on whatever podcast platform you use. It’ll help others find the show.

Shakespeare Unlimited comes to you from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Home to the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger is dedicated to advancing knowledge and the arts.

The Folger’s campus on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, is open to the public. Come check out our brand-new gardens and exhibition halls…it’s a real cabinet of curiosities! You can also watch a performance in our Tudor theater. You can find more information and plan your visit at our website, folger.edu

And many thanks for listening.