Topic Title: Global Shakespeare
From the 2012 London Olympics to a prison in South Africa, from Japanese internment camps in World War II to U.S. Civil war soldiers, Shakespeare has become "the world's poet," an author whose works have been read, adapted, appropriated, and performed in nearly every corner of the world. Covering such topics as Shakespeare in Asia, Africa, Europe, America, and the Middle East, this course will examine how Shakespeare is enmeshed with local performance and cultural practices around the world, and how various connotations of "Shakespeare" have shifted according to time, place, and geography. We will begin by asking "what is global Shakespeare?" and "why Shakespeare?", and then we will follow up on some of the national threads of global Shakespeare studies in as many corners of the world as possible. Students will pursue a topic related to global Shakespeare in an independent research paper. This course should appeal not only to students interested in Shakespeare, but also to those interested in global studies, nationalism, colonialism, heritage studies, performance traditions, theories of adaptation, and ideas of the transnational traffic of literary texts.