Booking and details
Dates Sat, April 22, 2023, 10am
Tickets Free, registration required
Duration 10am (ET)
The lecture will take place in the 401-D Conference Room.
Join us for a conversation with Dr. Ian Smith about his work on Shakespeare and race and why it matters for schools, teachers, and students. Facilitated by Amber Phelps, a high school English teacher at Baltimore City College High School and Folger Teacher Fellow, the session will include time for teachers to engage with Dr. Smith. Amber Phelps and Dr. Smith worked together (and with other teachers and scholars) on the Folger’s award-winning Black Shakespeare course.
This event will be held in person in Washington, DC.
Dr. Ian Smith
Ian Smith, Professor of English and Richard H., Jr. ’60 and Joan K. Sell Professor in the Humanities in the department of English at Lafayette College, discovered Shakespeare while studying French classical theater at the University of Paris before completing his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He is the author of Race and Rhetoric in Renaissance England: Barbarian Errors (2009) and collaborator on Othello Re-imagined in Sepia (2012). His most recent monograph Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race has been published by Cambridge UP (2022). He is the recipient of multiple fellowships in support of his scholarship and currently holds the Los Angeles Times chair in the History and Culture of the Americas at the Huntington Library. In 2016 he was a guest on the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast for an enduringly popular episode about Shakespeare, race, and early modern theatrical practices. He is also the Vice President of the Shakespeare Association of America.
This event is part of Searching for Shakespeare: Celebrating 400 Years of Shakespeare’s First Folio, our April 2023 festival in partnership with DC Public Library.