UMD News

Director of Public Relations:
Susan Beasy Latto, slatto@d.umn.edu
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March 21, 2002

Contact:
Susan Beasy Latto, Director of Public Relations 218 726-8830
Paul Cannan, Assistant Professor ,Department of English 218 726-6268

The UMD English Department is pleased to announce the third annual Klaus Jankofsky Lecture in Medieval/Renaissance Studies on Friday, March 29 at 4 pm in the Tweed Museum of Art. A reception will follow. The presentation is free and open to the public.

This year's speaker is Professor Garrett Sullivan, who will deliver a talk entitled, "In Praise of the Bohemian Shore, or The Cultural Logic of Shakespearean Geography." Using some of Shakespeare's notorious cartographic "errors" as a starting point, Professor Sullivan will explore the basic geographic structures of Shakespearean comedy.

Professor Sullivan is Associate Professor of English at Penn State University. He is author of "The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage" (Stanford UP, 1999). He was also recently awarded a long-term fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the NEH for his book-length project entitled "Planting Oblivion: Forgetting and Identity in Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Webster."

In his Jankofsky lecture, Prof. Sullivan will explore some of the ways in which the geography of Shakespeare's early comedies is indebted to and emerges out of specific literary and historical imperatives. He will consider the significance of the fact that these works are produced at the moment of transition between the "old" and "new" geographies. Professor Sullivan will focus on three geographies central to a number of the comedies, those of hospitality, paternity, and flight. By doing so, he will reveal the limitations of the critical models that have dominated the study of geography and/in Shakespeare, and isolate some of what we might call the deep geographic structures of Shakespearean comedy.