A Virtual Workshop for Teachers
July 19–23, 2021
WHY SHAKESPEARE AND RACE?
- In Shakespeare, after all, whiteness often stands in for beauty (“her azure veins, her alabaster skin,” Lucrece) and honor (“far more fair than black,” Othello).
- In Shakespeare, we meet poetry and characters that both impress and injure.
- It is all too easy to skip uncomfortable moments or gloss over students’ questions about “the rich jewel in the Ethiop’s ear” (Romeo and Juliet).
- But in Shakespeare, we encounter language and situations that necessitate difficult conversations about race, difference, and power.
WHY NOW?
- See Shakespeare as he really is: what’s there, what’s not there, whose stories are told, whose stories are not told.
- Learn how to talk about race with each other.
- Know how and why to use literature and their own voices to understand, expand, challenge, and improve their world.
WHAT WILL PARTICIPANTS DO?
When: July 19–23, 2021
The Schedule: We promise not to waste your time, and we promise to connect you with the best of the best—all week long. (Keep reading to see the all-star faculty!) Live, synchronous sessions will take place on Zoom between 10am ET and 2:15pm ET each day. Days begin with scholarship and end with teaching strategies, classroom resources, and discussion. Within this timeframe each day, you will also have a meal break and a shorter stretch break. There will not be tons of homework, but expect a total of 1-2 hours of self-paced work beyond the live sessions.
Cost: $330 for Teacher Members of the Folger / $400 for non-members (Become a Teacher Member for $40!)
Scholarships: The priority deadline for scholarship consideration was June 1, 2021. All scholarships have been awarded at this time.
Continuing education hours: Participants may request a certificate of completion at no additional cost.
Graduate credit: 3 graduate credits are available for an additional cost of $375 from Trinity Washington University.
Registration: Space is limited. Registration will remain open until July 8th.
The Folger is committed to assembling an inclusive community of inquisitve and respectful learners. All are welcome. Teachers of color are encouraged to sign up.
Questions? Email Peggy O'Brien.
FACULTY AND STAFF
Mentor Teachers
Dr. Deborah Gascon is a National Board Certified teacher who has taught for 25 years. She currently teaches English 2, AP English Literature and Composition, and Journalism at Dutch Fork High School near Columbia, SC. Deborah is a 2012 Teaching Shakespeare Institute alum and a Folger Summer Academy mentor teacher. While Shakespeare is her first love, she has also attended several other NEH Summer Institutes to study Dante (2004), Mozart (2013), and Dickens (2016) and taught English in Aiud, Romania on a Fulbright Teacher Exchange (2005-2006). In 2019 she completed her doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction at The University of South Carolina; her dissertation is about the teaching of Shakespeare to increase student comprehension, empathy, and awareness of gender and race issues.
Donnaye Moore is an English teacher at Brookwood High School in Georgia. She is a veteran teacher and an alum of the 2016 NEH-sponsored Teaching Shakespeare Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has presented with the Folger at the annual conference of the National Council of Teachers of English and has created groundbreaking curriculum and learning experiences in partnership with the Folger and Reconstruction, a startup providing personal, world-class, and unapologetically Black education.
Donna Denizé, an award-winning teacher and poet, will lead special discussion groups throughout the week. She is currently Chair of the English Department and Chair of the Faculty Diversity Committee at St. Albans School in Washington, DC. She participated in the first Teaching Shakespeare Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library and has been teaching students and teachers at the Folger ever since. Her work has appeared in several publications, including the Innisfree Journal of Poetry, Teacher's Digest, and the Folger's own Shakespeare Set Free series. Over the course of her long career as a teacher, writer, and scholar, she has worked with the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, Howard University, American University, DC Public Libraries, the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Scholars
Dr. Nedda Mehdizadeh is a Continuing Lecturer at UCLA Writing Programs. Her research and pedagogy center on early modern transnational encounter, Shakespeare, Critical Race Studies, and Critical Diversity Studies. She is writing her first monograph, Translating Persia in Early Modern English Writing, portions of which have been published in public-facing and peer-reviewed venues. She is also co-authoring a book with Dr. Ambereen Dadabhoy, Anti-Racist Shakespeare, under contract with Cambridge University Press for their Cambridge Elements series on Shakespeare and Pedagogy. This book project was inspired by their Critical Race Conversation, “Cultivating an Anti-Racist Pedagogy,” hosted by the Folger Institute.
Dr. Brian Jones is the Associate Director of Education and formerly a scholar in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He taught in New York City public schools for nine years before earning a PhD in Urban Education at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He writes about Black education history and politics, most recently in a contribution to Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice (Haymarket Books, 2020). His first book will be a study of the 1960s student movement at Tuskegee University in Alabama.
Dr. Katherine Gillen is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University–San Antonio, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, early modern literature, drama, and critical theory. She is the author of Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity, and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare’s Stage (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Her current work focuses on race and gender in early modern drama and on Shakespeare appropriation, and her monograph in progress explores the ways early modern dramatists used classical sources in their articulation of English whiteness. She is a co-founder of the Borderlands Shakespeare Collective, an initiative that seeks to archive, curate, and circulate works of Shakespeare adaptation in and around the US-Mexico Borderlands. As part of this Collective, she is co-editing an anthology of Borderlands Shakespeare plays.
Dr. Kyle Grady is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Grady’s primary areas of focus are early modern English literature and culture, African American literature and culture, and critical race theory. His current book project explores representations of black ascendency, racial mixing, and interracial cooperation in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. His work has appeared in Early Modern Culture, Pedagogy, Shakespeare Studies, and Shakespeare Quarterly.
Folger Staff
