Guest lecture by Prof. Goran Stanivukovic (Saint Mary's University, Canada) on “Shakespeare’s First Act: literature, theatre, and the earliest years”

18 Oct 2016

Tuesday 18th October, 6pm, in the Council Room, UCC

The School of English is delighted to host a special guest lecture by Prof. Goran Stanivukovic (Saint Mary's University, Canada) on the topic of “Shakespeare’s First Act: literature, theatre, and the earliest years”. The lecture takes place on Tuesday 18th October, 6pm, in the beautiful surroundings of the Council Room on the Quad, University College Cork. All are welcome to attend.

The lecture will focus on Shakespeare's ‘earliest’ Elizabethan years in London and will explore the theatrical, literary, and artistic conditions that shaped the critical perceptions of Shakespeare’s early works. Prof. Stanivukovic will seek to challenge the view of ‘earliest Shakespeare’ as a ‘young’ writer struggling to find his voice and as bound by rhetorical cliches, and will argue that Shakespeare produced some of the most avant-garde drama and innovative poetry of the late 1590s at just this ‘earliest’ stage of his creative life. Prof. Stanivukovic will further question how we think about what ‘young’, or ‘early’, and what these mean in our modern critical assessment of a literary career.

Prof. Stanivukovic will also share his recent research in a masterclass on “The Art of Being Together: Shakespeare and Friendship” for School of English postgraduates and BA in English students.

Prof. Stanivukovic is Professor of English at Saint Mary's University, Canada. He is a distinguished scholar of English Renaissance literature and Cultural Studies and the recipient of numerous research grants and fellowships (including an EU Marie Curie International Research Fellowship at UCC from 2011-2013). He has edited Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings (Palgrave, 2007), Ovid and the Renaissance Body (University of Toronto Press, 2001), and with Constance C. Relihan, Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570-1640 (Palgrave, 2003).His most recent monograph is Knights in Arms: Prose Romance, Masculinity, and Eastern Mediterranean Trade (University of Toronto Press, 2015). Prof Stanivukovic’s research interests include Shakespeare and drama of his contemporaries, prose romance, queer theory, masculinity, neo-classicism of the Renaissance, and the Renaissance Mediterranean.