Organizers

Sujata Iyengar (Professor of English, University of Georgia, UGA) and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (Professor of Early Modern English Studies, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III, UPVM3) are co-P.I.s on the three-year international cost-sharing grant "Scene-Stealing/Ravir la scène" underwritten by the Partner University Fund of the FACE Foundation and administered by the Cultural Services Arm of the French Embassy in the United States.

Core Team Members

Year 1 Team Members, in addition to the Project Directors, comprised the late Christy Desmet (Professor of English, UGA), Debbie Bell (Lecturer in French, UGA), Janice Valls-Russell (Professor of English, UPVM3), and PhD students Dorothy Todd (UGA), Ward Risvold (UGA), Nathalie Oziol (UPVM3), and postdoctoral student Alban Déleris (UPVM3).

Year 2 Team Members, in addition to the Project Directors, comprised the late Christy Desmet, Debbie Bell, Florence March (Professor of English, UPVM3), Nicholas Myers (Professor of English, UPVM3), and PhD students Nora Galland (UPVM3), Charlène Cruxent (UPVM3), Ward Risvold (UGA), JH Roberts (UGA), and Philip Gilreath (UGA).

Year 3 Team Members, in addition to the Project Directors, comprise Debbie Bell, Miriam Jacobson (Professor of English, UGA), Florence March, Jean-Christophe Mayer (Professor of English, UPVM3), Sarah Hatchuel (Professor of English, UPVM3), and PhD students Nora Galland (UPVM3), Charlène Cruxent (UPVM3), Gaoussou Fofana (UPVM3), Philip Gilreath (UGA), Sarah Mayo (UGA), Anna Forrester (UGA), and Mikaela LaFave (UGA).

Plenary Speakers

Sarah Hatchuel is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 (France) and President of the Société Française Shakespeare. She has written extensively on adaptations of Shakespeare's plays and on tv series; she is general coeditor of the CUP Shakespeare on Screen collection and of the online journal TV/Series.

Jean-Christophe Mayer is a Research Professor employed by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is also a member of the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-classical Age and the Enlightenment (IRCL) at Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier. His latest monograph is entitled Shakespeare’s Early Readers: A Cultural History from 1590 to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Since 2017, he is an expert for the European Commission in the field of humanities.

Presenters

Thursday

Sam McCracken is a second-year M.A. student in the University of Georgia’s Department of Comparative Literature. His research often considers the ways in which digital modes of communication have informed the shape and nature of contemporary narrative forms, but he has a penchant for literatures of all kinds. He holds Bachelor of Arts degrees with high honors in both English (Literary Studies) as well as Spanish (Language, Culture & Society) from Georgia State University.

Dr. Nathalie Rivère de Carles is Assistant Professor in English Renaissance Theatre at the University of Toulouse and works on Renaissance theatre history and the relationship between diplomacy and theatre. She authored several articles on the character of the ambassador and its appraisal in Renaissance drama and edited the monograph entitled Early Modern Diplomacy, Theatre and Soft Power: the Making of Peace (Palgrave 2016). She is currently working on an edition of the French and English versions of the 1603 treaty by Jean Hotman, The Ambassador.

Friday

Nora Galland is a Doctoral Researcher at the IRCL (Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical Age and the Enlightenment) CNRS UMR 5186 and Teaching Assistant at University Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3. Nora’s research interests include a pragmatic approach to study the racist insult, the construction of ‘race’ in the early modern period, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, contemporary adaptations, and appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays. Nora’s Ph.D. dissertation is titled “Scenes of racist insult in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama” and is under the supervision of Professors Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin and Dr. Jean-Christophe Mayer.

Charlène Cruxent is a doctoral researcher in early modern literature at the University of Montpellier Paul Valéry 3, France. Her thesis entitled "Nicknames in Shakespeare’s World" aims at observing occurrences of unofficial names and titles in the playwright’s works. With special attention on socio-cultural aspects, this thesis consists in an attempt to theorise the use of nicknames in Shakespeare’s plays.

Dr. Jennifer Flaherty received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an associate professor of Shakespeare studies, and her research emphasizes appropriation and global Shakespeare. Her work has been published in journals such as Borrowers and Lenders, Comparative Drama, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, and Theatre Symposium. She has also contributed chapters to the volumes The Horse as Cultural Icon and Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction.

Saturday

Philip Gilreath is a current PhD student at the University of Georgia. His research interests include ecocriticism, classical reception, and all things allusive and appropriative.

Dr. Erin DeYoung received her PhD from Trinity College Dublin where she studied foreignness in Early Modern history plays. Her other research interests include narratives in contemporary media, speculative fiction, and gender in science fiction. She has been teaching Shakespeare at several universities for the last decade including Savannah State University.

Dr. Miriam Jacobson is an associate professor at the University of Georgia. Her research interests include Anglo-Ottoman trade, the role of antiquity, and the history of material texts and language. Jacobson is the author of Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Her second book project, Renaissance Undead: Reanimating the Past in Early Modern England explores the concept of "Renaissance" from a uniquely early modern perspective, arguing that the rebirth of the past is figured in the animation and resurrection of dead bodies in poetry, prose, images, and drama. Since 2012 Jacobson has co-organized the Willson Center sponsored Symposium on the Book, an ongoing semiannual one-day symposium on material and immaterial textuality held at the Special Collections Libraries Building in the spring and fall.

Alexander Holcey is a native of Savannah, Georgia. After this Spring semester, Alexander will be a Senior majoring in English Language and Literature. A few of Alexander’s goals after graduation involve becoming an official tech writer, while pursuing work alongside those who work with Cartoon Network under the company called Turner.

Deja Watkins is a native of Athens, Georgia. Throughout her matriculation at Savannah State University she was involved in several different organizations which include Student Government Association, National Society of Leadership and Success and The National Council of Negro Women. Deja enjoys writing, traveling and dancing during her free-time. Deja plans to obtain an Masters Degree in Higher Education Administration from Georgia Southern University.

Fatina Frayall earned a Bachelor’s degree in English Language & Literature and a minor in Africana Studies from Savannah State University. Fatina’s future plans are to become an educator in the public school system. Fatina is passionate about helping children realize their full potential and how powerful the tool of literacy can be influential to an individual’s life.

Kierston Foston is a student at Savannah State University.

Dr. Ruth Morse grew up in the United States, studied medieval and renaissance English literature there and at Cambridge University. She is now retired, having taught at the universities of London, Sussex, Leeds, and Cambridge, and since 1995 has been professeur des universités at Paris-Sorbonne-Cité (Diderot). Her books include Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Reality, and Representation (Cambridge, 1991). Her articles range from medieval to post-colonial literature, and she is currently completing a book entitled 'Imagined Histories: medieval fictions of the past, Beowulf to Shakespeare'. Her next project is a book on the history of The Tempest.

Dr. Melissa Cooper is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University – Newark. Melissa received her PhD in History from Rutgers University and specializes in African American cultural and intellectual history, and the history of the African Diaspora. She is the author of Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), an intellectual and cultural history that examines the emergence of "the Gullah" in scholarly and popular works during the 1920s and the 1930s. She is the author of Instructor's Resource Manual--Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2013) and a contributor to Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line (Rutgers University Press, 2015).

Kim Waters is a doctoral candidate in Linguistics at the University of Georgia. She earned an MA in Linguistics from UGA, an MBA / MHA from Georgia State University, and a BS from Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include endangered AmerIndian languages and creoles, especially those indigenous to her home state of Georgia, Cherokee and Gullah-Geechee. She has conducted field research on Gullah-Geechee on Sapelo Island and in Darien, GA, and on St. Helena Island, SC. She examined both real- and cyber-space linguistic landscapes in coastal South Carolina and intonation patterns in recordings of the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States. She adopts a laboratory phonology approach to conduct acoustic analysis of speech recordings and explores which sociolinguistic factors may contribute to phonetic variation. Her dissertation adopts a perceptual dialectology approach to investigate linguistic profiling. Kim was a member of the first cohort of Diversity & Inclusion Graduate Fellows and the first WIP TA for Phonetics and Phonology. In 2017, she accepted an appointment as a Consultant in UGA’s Writing Center. She has taught First Year Composition (ENGL1101) and The Study of Language (LING2100) at UGA, as well as various courses in business and math for other USG institutions. She is a charter member of the Linguistics Society at UGA.

Dr. Sujata Iyengar, Professor of English at the University of Georgia, is author of many books and articles about early modern race, Shakespearean appropriation, and performance. With the late Christy Desmet, she co-founded the award-winning online scholarly periodical Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, and with Professor Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin of the Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III, she is co-investigator of the three-year international grant "Scene-Stealing/Ravir la scène," supported by the Partner University Fund of the FACE Foundation (Cultural Services Arm of the French Embassy in the United States).