Kingston Shakespeare Podcasts

Sprang argues for a progressiveness in Yates in regards to Shakespeare (that is not merely limited to the occult) in her understanding in the use of images, especially pertaining to memory. He re-evaluates Yates’ observation that the advent of Ramist thinking has had an effect on the way Shakespeare. He links this view to cognitive approaches to Shakespeare and images.

Felix Sprang has worked mainly on the intersection of literature and the ‘arts and sciences’ in early modern England as well as on the connection between literature and science across all literary periods. He is also interested in the aesthetics of literary texts and the methods derived from the project “Kulturwissenschaft”, in particular the strand devised by Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer. Felix Sprang has studied English, Biology, Philosophy and Paedagogics at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Hamburg, and has received his PhD from the University of Hamburg with a dissertation that probes into literary reflections of scientific thought in early modern London. That book was largely conceived as Aby Warburg Scholar at the Warburg Institute, University of London. Having taught at the HU Berlin and the LMU Munich, he is now teaching English Literature at the University of Siegen.

The conference Frances Yates: The Art of Memory was held on April 30, 2016 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. The session was chaired by Edward Chaney. Recorded by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen.

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Margaret McGowan began teaching at the University of Strasbourg in 1955, moving on to the University of Glasgow in 1957, and then to the University of Sussex in 1964, where she was Professor of French, 1974–97, Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor, 1992–97, and since 1997 has been a Research Professor. She was Vice President of the British Academy, 1996–98 and Chairman of the Review of the Warburg Institute, 2006–07. She was appointed FRSA in 1997, a Freeman of the City of Tours in 1986 and awarded Hon. DLitt Sussex, in 1999. Her publications include L’Art du Ballet de Cour, 1963; Montaigne’s Deceits, 1974; Ideal Forms in the Age of Ronsard, 1985; Louis XIII’s Court Ballets, 1989; Moy qui me voy: studies of the self, 1990; The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France, 2000; and Dance in the Renaissance: European fashion, French obsession, 2008 (Wolfson History Prize, 2008) . She was appointed CBE in 1998.

The conference Frances Yates: The Art of Memory was held on April 30, 2016 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. The session was chaired by Peter Mack. Recorded by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen.

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Through historiographical reassessment of the life of Frances Yates, Marjorie G. Jones seeks to expound an adventurous side to Frances Yates’ world view as an autodidact and an outsider to traditional academia. In contrast to views of Yates’ non-existent spiritual life, Jones builds an analogy with the daring spiritual adventures that Yates studied, Giordano Bruno in particular, and the life she lived—‘rising beyond dogma to a higher truth’, as Jones explains.

Interested especially in women’s spiritual journeys, Marjorie G. Jones is the author of the first biography of British historian Frances Yates, Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition (Ibis Press, 2008, since translated into Japanese and Italian) and a recently published biography of Philadelphia Quaker Mary Vaux Walcott, The Life and Times of Mary Vaux Walcott (Schiffer Press, 2016), which has been nominated for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Mary Lynn Kotz award. A resident of Philadelphia, currently she teaches history for Villanova University’s college program at Graterford Prison in Pennsylvania. Before moving to Philadelphia, she taught history for twenty years at Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, NY and for its college program at Sing Sing prison. A graduate of Wheaton College, Massachusetts, she is also a graduate of the Rutgers Law School and the Graduate Faculty of the New School in NYC, where she focused on Historical Studies.

The conference Frances Yates: The Art of Memory was held on April 30, 2016 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. The session was chaired by Francesca Bugliani. Recorded by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen.

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Building on the work of Frances Yates, Sajed Chowdhury (National University of Ireland, Galway) proposes that hermetic writings (Hermes Trismegistus, in particular) were key influences on some renaissance women. He argues that hermetic writings, accessed via male contemporaries, informed the spiritual, medical and textual practices of women like Marguerite of Navarre, Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn, which are elucidated by a reading of their philosophical poetry. Chowdhury seeks to reintegrate significant strands of early modern intellectual and esoteric culture into intellectual history that has been lost due to a focus on a masculine geneology of knowledge.

Sajed Chowdhury’s primary field of research is early modern literature, specializing in Renaissance poetry, early modern women’s writing, manuscript identities, and the history of sexuality. His doctoral thesis, Dissident Metaphysics in Renaissance Women’s Poetry (2013), was completed at the University of Sussex and was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). He is currently based at RECIRC, NUI Galway (http://recirc.nuigalway.ie/).

The conference Frances Yates: The Art of Memory was held on April 30, 2016 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. The session was chaired by Francesca Bugliani. Recorded by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen.

More at: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/

Anne-Valérie Dulac examines Frances Yates’ reading of Alhazen’s (Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham; c. 965 – c. 1040) optics as a possible source for the theory of sight in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Dulac prodes deeper into this bold suggestion and provides a reading of the play’s optics (also linking them to the Sonnets) as mirroring Alhazen – a combination of intromission and extramission, the eye receiving and emitting beams of light.

Anne-Valérie Dulac is a senior lecturer in early modern literature at Université Paris 13 - Sorbonne Paris Cité. She is currently working on the forthcoming publication of her doctoral dissertation on Philip Sidney and visual culture, completed under the supervision of Professor François Laroque. Her research interests include Sir Philip Sidney’s works and correspondence, visual culture, limning and optics. The paper she will be presenting for this conference is adapted from a forthcoming chapter (“Shakespeare and Alhazen”) in a book edited by Sophie Chiari and Mickaël Popelard entitled Shakespeare and Science.

The conference Frances Yates: The Art of Memory was held on April 30, 2016 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. The session was chaired by Patricia Gillies. Recorded by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen.

More at: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/

Dilwyn Knox is Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College London. His research currently focuses on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century philosophy, particularly cosmology. He is writing a book, a short one, with luck, entitled The Philosophy of Giordano Bruno.

The conference Frances Yates: The Art of Memory was held on April 30, 2016 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. Recorded by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen.

More at: kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/

Richard Wilson is Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Kingston University, London, and author of Wordly Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our Good Will (2016); Free Will: Art and power on Shakespeare’s stage (2013); Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (2007); Secret Shakespeare: Essays on theatre, religion and resistance (2004); and Will Power: Studies in Shakespearean authority (1993). His forthcoming book is a study of Shakespeare and the dictators: Modern Friends: Shakespeare’s Fellow Travellers.

The conference Frances Yates: The Art of Memory was held on April 30, 2016 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. Recorded by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen.

More at: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/

Listen to this KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) Work-in-Progress session with Dr Varsha Panjwani (Boston and York) and Koel Chatterjee (Royal Holloway), held on the 14th of April at the Rose Theatre Kingston, on Indian Shakespeares on Screen: Identity, Politics, Entertainment, chaired by Timo Uotinen. Find out more about their succesful conference and project at indianshakespearesonscreen.com. The recordings are divided into four parts: interview about the project, Varsha’s talk on 10 ml Love (adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Koel on Arshinagar (a Romeo and Juliet adaptation), and an open discussion about all the above.

More at: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/kissit-wip-indians-shakespeares-on-screen-podcast/

Listen to this KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) Work-in-Progress session with Dr Varsha Panjwani (Boston and York) and Koel Chatterjee (Royal Holloway), held on the 14th of April at the Rose Theatre Kingston, on Indian Shakespeares on Screen: Identity, Politics, Entertainment, chaired by Timo Uotinen. Find out more about their succesful conference and project at indianshakespearesonscreen.com. The recordings are divided into four parts: interview about the project, Varsha’s talk on 10 ml Love (adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Koel on Arshinagar (a Romeo and Juliet adaptation), and an open discussion about all the above.

More at: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/kissit-wip-indians-shakespeares-on-screen-podcast/

Listen to this KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) Work-in-Progress session with Dr Varsha Panjwani (Boston and York) and Koel Chatterjee (Royal Holloway), held on the 14th of April at the Rose Theatre Kingston, on Indian Shakespeares on Screen: Identity, Politics, Entertainment, chaired by Timo Uotinen. Find out more about their succesful conference and project at indianshakespearesonscreen.com. The recordings are divided into four parts: interview about the project, Varsha’s talk on 10 ml Love (adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Koel on Arshinagar (a Romeo and Juliet adaptation), and an open discussion about all the above.

More at: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/kissit-wip-indians-shakespeares-on-screen-podcast/