Shakespeare's Birthday Lecture: "Shakespeare Beyond Relevance" with Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper

About the lecture: “Shakespeare Beyond Relevance”

In recent years, there has been a rising interest in ‘public humanities’ or ‘public scholarship’. The idea of sharing scholarship with a general audience or creating a public humanities project is nothing new, of course. But in the past five years, there seems to have been a tangible urgency prompting scholars of the humanities to make their research appeal more broadly; for Shakespeare studies, this involves making Shakespeare relevant, even though this is something each generation has done for about 400 years.

For teachers, this means finding new strategies to relate Shakespeare to the current moment and to the lives and experiences of their students. But what does it mean for us in 2025 if Shakespeare is decidedly relevant? What do we mean by this term anyway? Is it about keeping Shakespeare, and by extension, the arts and humanities, in the cultural and public conversation? And if so, is this enough? Taking the idea of ‘relevance’ as a starting point, this talk will explore ideas of how to position Shakespeare today as we move into a challenging phase of American democracy.