TCC affiliate update

May 30

Written By Chris T

The TCC’s affiliate members now number almost fifty - a remarkable group of scholars, creative practitioners and teachers who work somewhere at the intersection of Shakespeare, transnationalism and multilingualism. If you’ve been following our News and events posts over the past couple of years, you’ll have seen that we like to “boast” about and on behalf of our affiliates. But it’s hard to keep up with this crackerjack gang of bona fide academic and artistic rockstars! So we thought that this month we’d share a little of what just some of our affiliate members have been up to. First, however, we’re pleased to introduce a few recently-confirmed affiliates.

Malcolm Cocks is a Lecturer in Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. He is mostly interested in grassroots theatre adaptations and performances of Shakespeare’s plays in a global context and particularly from the perspective of the audience. He was the Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Shakespeare and Global Audiences at the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre where he worked with touring productions and particularly the Globe-To-Globe Hamlet World Tour (2014-2016). He is currently working on a project that brings audience archiving, spectatorship, and history of the emotions into the seminar room by centring students as spectators for the plays. His teaching includes Global Shakespeare, African theatre, Performance Studies, and Renaissance poetics.

Gina Bloom is a Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Davis. Along with early modern drama and Shakespeare studies, her research interests include gender and feminist theory, theatre history and performance, game studies, digital arts/humanities, and education. She is the author of Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater (2018) and Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (2007). With UC Davis colleagues she co-designed the Mixed Reality game Play the Knave, a teaching and performance tool that allows students to engage with Shakespeare’s plays via avatars that mimic real-life movement. Play the Knave has been widely adopted by teachers in the US and is currently being rolled out in South African schools. It is also the central case study in a born-digital book she and her collaborators recently released: Experimenting with Shakespeare: Games and Play in the Laboratory (2024). The appendix to the book includes a link to download Blood Will Have Blood, a Shakespeare curriculum that uses Play the Knave to address contemporary violence, co-created with South African high school educator and theatre artist Lauren Bates.

Ben Naylor is Dean of BADA, the British American Drama Academy, in London. He is a director, actor, writer, researcher and educator. He was previously a Senior Lecturer at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (2006-2023). He trained as a director with Peter Hall at the National Theatre and as an actor at Drama Centre London. He has taught at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the Shakespeare Centre and the Young Vic. Over the years Ben has directed fourteen Shakespeare productions and has worked on Shakespeare in translation into several languages, including Spanish, Greek, Hebrew and even Latin! As both director and as acting teacher, his approach to Shakespeare ranges stylistically from ‘original practices’ to the radically contemporary.

In other news ...

At the recent annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Ruben Espinosa (Associate Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University) was elected as SAA President for 2024-25. Espinosa and ACMRS Director Ayanna Thompson - who is also a TCC affiliate - have developed an exciting new teaching resource, Throughlines, which will be launched on 1 August. Featuring contributions from 24 leading scholars, Throughlines will help teachers to bring premodern critical race studies into the classroom, offering lectures, activities, exemplar syllabi and more. You can sign up here to join the Throughlines mailing list and receive early access to Espinosa’s “Revising the Shakespeare Survey” annotated syllabus.
Odirin Abonyi is part of the Nigerian Pidgin Dictionary Project (NaijaSynCor) team at the University of Ibadan and IFRA-Nigeria, whose lexicographical efforts over a number of years have culminated in A Dictionary of Naija: Nigerian Pidgin Dictionary, edited by Francis Egbokhare. A number of events related to the launch of this title will be taking place in 2024. In October the University of Ibadan will host a conference on the theme of “Naijá Na Hélélé (Naija is Incredible)” and a Naija Festival that will include a performance of Ogini Bernard’s Oga Pikin, a Naija version of Hamlet.
Kathryn Vomero Santos is the recipient of a 2024 Trinity University Distinguished Achievement Award for Research and Teaching. Her citation describes her as a “field-shifting teacher-scholar” whose work redefines “what literature and literary studies are for”.
Robyn Tyler (University of the Western Cape) and her colleagues at bua-lit and the Language for Learning Project are celebrating the official announcement that South African schools will incrementally offer mother tongue-based bilingual education from Grade 4 next year. Read more about this major shift in education policy and some of the language and literacy experts who have been advocating for it!

Sandra Young and Buhle Ngaba are about to complete their respective residencies at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Market Theatre Laboratory. During her Long-term Fellowship at the Folger, Young has been working on a research project titled “Tracing racial slavery in early modern public culture and its afterlives: Reading strategies for an ambivalent archive”. Ngaba’s Barney Simon Residency at the Market has focused on practice-based research exploring “Phatsima”, the contested Cullinan II diamond excavated from Kimberley in 1897 and given to the British royal family.
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, edited by Patricia Akhimie and published this month, includes contributions by TCC affiliates Carla Della Gatta, Amrita Sen, Alexa Alice Joubin, Ruben Espinosa and Amrita Dhar.

Chris T

TCC affiliate update

South African Shakespeareans in Bayreuth

Kani (and Suzman) on Othello