Scott Newstok teaches at Rhodes College, where he is Director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment. He is the author of Quoting Death in Early Modern England, editor of Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare, and co-editor (with Ayanna Thompson) of Weyward Macbeth.
Special Session
“The Mind’s Construction”: Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters
Nicholas R. Helms is a 2015 graduate of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. His research applies cognitive science to the early modern period, and his first book, Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters is forthcoming from Palgrave in 2019. He also acts as artistic director of the Improbable Fictions staged reading series (improbablefictions.org).
Program Schedule
Thursday, October 11
11 am–5pm Registration, (Pugsley Room)
1:00–2:20pm
Session 1: ‘We are such stuff…’: Memory, Cognition, Bias
(President’s Suite)
Moderator: Jane Wells, Muskingum University
Russ Bodi, Owens College: “Knowing Shakespeare through Dunning-Kruger”
Lisa Starks, University of South Florida: “Jessica’s Ring: Knowing, Transcendence, and Memory in Shakespearean
Performance”
Joseph Sullivan, Marietta College: “The Intensification and Diminishment of Hindsight Bias in Shakespeare’s Othello.”
Session 2: Gender, Knowing, Reading, and Ambiguity (Jones Room)
Moderator: Hillary Nunn, University of Akron
Emily Donahue, Notre Dame College: “Cavendish Considers Shakespeare: Rereading The Convent of Pleasure and Love’s Labor’s Lost”
Jennifer Forsyth, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania:
“Questioning the Renaissance”
Peter Byrne, Kent State University – Trumbull: “The Miseducation of William Shakespeare: Lessons from Titus Andronicus”
2:30–3:50pm
Session 3: Strange Magic, Scorched Earths, and The Making of Meaning (President’s Suite)
Moderator: Corey Andrews, Youngstown State University
Charles Conaway, University of Southern Indiana: “Toxic Environments and Shakespearean Villainy”
Kezia Vanmeter Sproat, Highbank Farm Peace Education Center: “Was Shakespeare A Feminist? The Evidence of The Merry Wives of Windsor”
Savannah Rae Xaver, Western Michigan University: “Knowledge and Premonitions: The Gendering of Magic in Shakespeare’s Comedies and Tragedies”
Session 4: Performance and Pedagogy (President’s Suite)
Moderator: Lisa Starks, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg
Niamh O’Leary, Xavier University: “How is Shakespeare Known in the Primary and Secondary School Classroom?”
Daniel Lauby, University of New Hampshire: “Rhizomatic Classroom: Early Modern Performance and Adaptation through LARP”
Erin Kelly, California State University Chico: “Mutual Meaning Making: Dramatic Staging and Student-Led Discussion in the Shakespeare Classroom.”
4:00–5:20pm
Workshop Session – Shakespeare Player Game Demonstration
Moderators: Sandra Logan and Becky Palmer-Scott
This workshop demonstrates the development of a game based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in which students choose a thematic scenario (historical or invented), define the characters and events of the play in alignment with that scenario, and rescript the chosen scenes (or the entire play) to align the dialogue with their redefined characters and events.
9:00–10:20am
Session 5: “… study what you most affect”: Knowing, Teaching, and Connecting “texts” (President’s Suite)
Moderator: Eva McManus, Ohio Northern University
Valentina Gheorghe, Youngstown State University: “Teaching Shakespeare Through and Despite Syntax”
Philip Goldfarb Styrt, St. Ambrose University: “Teaching Students Who Already ‘Know’ Shakespeare”
David McAvoy, Miami University Middletown: “Knock there and ask your heart what it doth know” Relatability and Knowability of Shakespeare through Memes
Session 6: Kings, Queens, and Bodies Politic, (Jones Room)
Moderator: Sandra Logan, Michigan State University
Anne-Marie Walkowicz, Central State University: “Dramatizing Deposition: Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Representation of Constitutionalism”
Erich Frieberger, Jacksonville University: “Due Measure: The Allusions to Plato’s Sophist and Statesman in Shakespeare’s Hamlet”
Alyssa Miller, University of Colorado Boulder: “The Queen of Scene Fourteen: Political Strategy and Feminist Fealty in the First Quarto of Shakespeare’s Hamlet”
10:30-11:30am
Special Session, Nicholas R. Helms. (Chestnut Room)
“The Mind’s Construction”: Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters
1:00–2:20pm
Session 7, Roundtable: Shakespeare’s Administrator (Bresnahan Room)
Shakespeare’s drama has imaginatively impacted our thinking about administrative roles, the scope of power, and what constitutes heroic versus villainous activity. This roundtable will explore some of those impacts by asking the overarching question, “who are Shakespeare’s administrators (past and present), and how do they seek to order the world around them?”
Participants:
Catherine Thomas, Georgia Gwinnett College
Lisa Starks, University of South Florida
Jennifer Feather, UNC Greensboro
Emily Isaacson, Heidelberg University
Session 8: Reading, Time, and Travel (President’s Suite)
Moderator: Susan Oldreive, Baldwin-Wallace University
William Grim, Strayer University: “Time Preference in Shakespeare”
David Summers, Capital University: “Knowing the World: Shakespeare on Travel in As You Like It and Othello”
Geoffrey Johns, Central Michigan University: “Without his Books: Knowledge and the Art of Power”
2:30–3:50pm
Session 9: “I’ll Teach You Differences”: Gender, Knowledge, and Power (President’s Suite)
Jordan Kohn-Foley, University of South Florida St. Petersburg: “Knowing Shakespeare: Misogyny in the Sonnets”
Eva McManus, Ohio Northern University: “‘You know what you know!’: Shakespeare’s Othello as Political Barometer”
Meghan Pachay, The Ohio State University. “Illegible Bodies: Pregnancy, Epistemology, and Power in The Winter’s Tale and the Midwifery Treatise”
Session 10: Knowing, Noting, and Logic (Jones Room)
Moderator: Russ Bodi, Owens Community College
Kevin Joseph Windhauser, Columbia University: “The Caesura and the Syllogism: Poetic Form, Logic, and Knowledge in Venus and Adonis”
Jane Wells, Muskingum University: “The Counterfeit Trap in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing”
Anthony Patricia, Concord University: “‘In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed . . . :’ Knowing Sex in Hamlet”
4:00–5:20pm
Session 11: Translations and Transmigrations of Early Modern Knowledge (Bresnahan Room)
Moderator: Timothy Francisco, Youngstown State University
Carol Mejia LaPerle, Wright State University: “John Ogilby’s Atlas Chinensis: Anglo-Dutch Exchange and the (Re)Printing of China”
Anna Klosowska, Miami University: “Forgetting and Reinventing Race, Colonization and Slavery in 1600s Paris: Baptismal Basin of St. Louis; Boccaccio and Saint-Amant on the Canary Islands; Black Sappho and Andromeda”
Emily Weissbourd, Lehigh University: “Blood and Blackness: Marrying the ‘woman from elsewhere’ in early modern English and Spanish Drama”
Session 12: Sleeping, Dreaming, and ‘The prospect of belief’ (President’s Suite)
Moderator: James Newlin, Case Western Reserve University
Eric Brinkman, Ohio State University: “‘O, now you look like Hubert!’: Cognitive Dissonance and the Murder of Children in King John”
Edward Probasco, Kutztown University: “On Shakespeare and Sleep: A Defamiliarizing Approach to the Loss of Innocence”
Nathanial Smith, Central Michigan University: “‘Do I dream?’: Chaucerian Skepticism in The Taming of the Shrew”
6:00-7:30pm
Screening: The Triumph of Time (Chestnut Room)
Shakespearean actor Tommy Gomez and Librettist
Sandra Logan will present a video of their collaborative project, The Triumph of Time, based on The Winter’s Tale. The 75 minute piece is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, set to an original composition by independent composer Ruth Chan, written for musical trio (violin, clarinet, and piano) and spoken voice. It includes an iambic pentameter narrator role (Time), in addition to 9 character parts played by the single actor, Tommy Gomez. It is an intense, dramatic piece that has received very positive audience response in several small-venue performances. The screening of the video will be followed by a brief presentation on the creation of the project and a Q&A session with Tommy Gomez and Sandra Logan.
9:00–10:20am
Session 13: Politics of (and) Adaptation (Jones Room)
Moderator: Carol Meija La-Perle, Wright State University
Tom Slagle, Youngstown State University. “‘Fear Not My Government’: Political Discourses on Race and Class in Othello”
Dan Mills: “Jacques Lacan, Sons of Anarchy, and Post-Hamlet Postmodernities”
Jimmy Newlin, Case Western Reserve University. “‘I Have Suffered With Those That I Saw Suffer’: Perceiving Trauma in Brigsby Bear and The Tempest”
Session 14: Discourses of Knowing: Texts and Contexts
(President’s Suite)
Moderator: Joesph Sullivan, Marietta University
Jim Casey, Arcadia University: “Knowing It’s Just a Play: How Paratext Frames Playtext”
Jonathan Holmes, Central State University: “Understanding Characters through Character Lists in Manuscript”
Byron Nelson, West Virginia University: “Crimes and Misdemeanors: Finding Appropriate Punishments for Parolles and Lucio”
Session 15, Undergraduate Roundtable: Talking about Gender: Shakespeare in the Contemporary Classroom
(Bresnahan Room)
Co-organizers: Hillary Nunn; Jennifer Forsyth; Eva McManus; Susan Oldrieve
Student participants: Megan Mayle, The University of Akron; Sonia Potter, The University of Akron; Marisa Lucas, Ohio Northern
10:30-11:30am
Plenary Session, Scott Newstok, “Islands of Knowledge” (Chestnut and Extension)
11:30am–1:00pm – Lunch (on your own)
Open Saturday Nearby (5-10 min walk): Cultivate Co- Op Café (901 Elm) Pressed Coffee Bar and Eatery, Jimmy Johns, HotHead Burritos, Inner Circle Pizza, Subway (Lincoln/Elm) MVR (410 N. Walnut) Starbucks (Lincoln/Rayen) Taco Bell, McDonald’s (Fifth Ave.) On Campus: Chick-fil-A (Kilcawley Center)
1:00–2:20pm
Session 16: Crimes, Punishments and Knowings of Selfhood (Jones Room)
Moderator: Stephanie Gearhart, Bowling Green State University
Jordan Floyd, Ohio University: “Lessons from the Two Gentlemen of Verona: The Myth of Male’s Path to Selfhood”
Byron Nelson, West Virginia University: “Crimes and Misdemeanors: Finding Appropriate Punishments for Parolles and Lucio”
Gabriel Rieger, Concord University: “‘Father, being weak, seem so’: Knowing the (Anti) Mother Goddess in King Lear”
Elizabeth Williamsen, Minnesota State University, Mankato: #MeToo, Mariana: Teaching Measure for Measure in 2018
Session 17: Student Roundtable (Bresnahan Room)
Facilitators: Joesph Sullivan, Marietta University; Russ Bodi, Owens Community College
Daulton Huffman, Kutztown University. “Heavy Metal Education.”
Liz Harris, Xavier University: “Teaching Drama-Based Instruction to Education Students”
Sandy Lee, Ohio State University: “Gender, Knowledge, and Plays-within-plays in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure”
The Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference thanks the following
sponsors and supporters:
YSU Office of Research
YSU Marketing and Communications
YSU College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
YSU English Department
Rachel Appell and Thomas J Slagle
YSU’s Kilcawley Center staff and management
The Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference Executive Board:
Hillary Nunn, University of Akron
Russell J. Bodi, Owens Community College
Joseph Sullivan, Marietta College
Sandra Logan, Michigan State University
Carol Mejia La-Perle, Wright State University
Jim Casey, Arcadia University
David George, Urbana University
Jane Wells, Muskingum University
Eva McManus, Ohio Northern University
Timothy Francisco, Youngstown State University
Susan Oldrieve, Baldwin Wallace College
Stephannie S. Gearhart, Bowling Green State University
