QMUL Annual Catherine Silverstone Lecture: Farah Karim-Cooper

Attendance is FREE. All welcome.

The in-person event will take place in the Arts Two Lecture Theatre on the Mile End campus at Queen Mary University of London. The venue is accessible. The event will be followed by a wine reception.

Please arrive for 6 .45pm (BST). The lecture commences at 7pm sharp (BST).

This talk will focus on the ways in which the development of casting has pushed the contemporary performance of Shakespeare into a contested space. Drawing on Catherine Silverstone’s interest in the ‘ethics of representation and spectatorship’, I want to examine the debates surrounding the different current modes of casting and highlight the ways in which identity-anxiety can serve regressively to neutralize race and other characteristics, such as gender and disability. I will draw from examples of contemporary productions of Shakespeare and early modern drama to argue for a multi-modal approach to casting, that considers the specificities of text, the trauma of differing communities and the position of Shakespeare in the UK as elite, white property.

Those of us who had the pleasure to work with Catherine knew her to be an intuitive thinker, a brilliant doctoral supervisor, a generous, warm, and committed teacher, and a bold leader, notably in her tenure as Head of the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary. Catherine was a highly regarded scholar of contemporary queer and decolonial studies, including in Māori performance of Shakespeare in Aotearoa New Zealand, the films of Derek Jarman, and LGBTQIA culture broadly, including in relation to club performance, queer adolescence, and performances of queer affirmation and remembrance, trauma and death. This named lecture honours and celebrates Catherine’s legacy by inviting a speaker to present research that is distinguished for its reflection of some of the characteristics of Catherine’s own research: rigorous, passionate, and intellectually searching in its attention to theatre and performance; elegant in its interdisciplinarity; committed to challenging the authority of the canon, whether by disturbing the influence of historical texts and authorships or by trafficking seemingly ‘illegitimate’ objects and practices into scholarship; and robustly inclusive in its concern for feminist, queer, trans, Indigenous, Black and Brown scholarship and practices, including in the Global South.

Farah is Professor of Shakespeare Studies, King’s College London, and Director of Education (Higher Education & Research) at Shakespeare’s Globe, where she has worked for 20 years. Her most recent book, The Great White Bard: Shakespeare, Race and the Future (2023) was voted in the top 100 books of 2023 by Time magazine, NPR and The New Yorker.

Farah served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America 2021-22 after five years on the Board of Trustees. She received the British Shakespeare Association Fellowship Award 2023 for her contribution to Shakespeare Studies and Inclusivity. She held an Oxford Humanities Cultural Programme Fellowship and was Visiting Fellow of Exeter College Oxford from 2022-23. She has served on councils of the Warburg Institute and the Society for Renaissance Studies and is currently a Trustee of the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre. She led the architectural enquiries into early modern theatres at Shakespeare’s Globe and was co-project leader on the construction of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

Farah has published over 40 chapters, reviews and articles. She is co-General Editor of Arden’s Shakespeare in the Theatre series, Arden’s Critical Intersections Series, and the Folger Shakespeare editions. She has published several books on Shakespeare, theatre, performance and culture, including: Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh UP, 2006, revised ed. 2019) and The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (Arden 2016). She co-edited Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment with Christie Carson (Cambridge UP 2008); Shakespeare’s Theatres and Effects of Performance with Tiffany Stern (Arden 2012) and Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse with Andrew Gurr (CUP 2014); she edited a collection of essays for Arden, Titus Andronicus: The State of Play (2019), and the text of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi for the Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, collated by Jeremy Lopez (2020).

In 2018 Farah founded and curated the Globe’s Shakespeare and Race Festival and conceived and curated the Antiracist Shakespeare Webinar series (2021-24). She is an executive board member for RaceB4Race, a consortium of scholars and institutions that seek racial justice in the field of premodern literary studies. In the UK she founded the first Early Modern Scholars of Colour network and is the Globe Director of the Shakespeare Centre London, a major research partnership between Shakespeare’s Globe and King’s College London.

[Photos of Catherine Silverstone courtesy of People's Palace Projects]

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Queen Mary University of London, Arts 2 Lecture Theatre, Queen Mary University of London, Arts 2 Lecture Theatre, London, United Kingdom