Shakespeare and the Digital World: When scholarship meets global capitalism

Thursday 30 March, 1pm Milgate Room, AD Hope Bldg, SLLL
In order to understand the place of the academic in the commercially driven world of digital recording, archiving and dissemination of Shakespeare’s plays in text and performance I put together a volume entitled Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice. In this book, which tackles the thorny issues of authority and power, Peter Kirwan, my co-editor, and I stress the importance of continually redefining what is meant by ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘the digital’. In this paper I scrutinise my own work to illustrate the importance of speculating about the future in order to help to form, as well as inform, it.

Christie Carson is Reader in Shakespeare and Performance in the Department of English at Royal Holloway University of London. She is the co-editor of The Cambridge King Lear CD-ROM: Text and Performance Archive (Cambridge, 2000) and the Principal Investigator of the AHRB-funded research project Designing Shakespeare: An Audio-Visual Archive, 1960-2000, which documents the performance history of Shakespeare in Stratford and London. She has published widely on the subject of contemporary performance and the influence of digital technology on audience interaction and research practices, including articles for Shakespeare Survey and Performance Research. She has co-edited four volumes of essays for Cambridge University Press.