2015/16 Visiting Fellow

Dr Sandra Young will be a Visiting Fellow in the Global Shakespeare Project during the month of October. During her time with us, Sandra will be working on her current book manuscript on ‘Shakespeare and the Global South’, an investigation into Shakespeare’s ongoing cultural life across the global south. In this work she makes a case for the critical usefulness of the term ‘global south’ and reflects on the reanimation and transformation of Shakespeare’s plays within Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean world, and on the value of these encounters for postcolonial studies.

During her stay with us Sandra will teach a graduate class in the MA programme, reviewing multiple stagings of Hamlet in order to reflect on the transformations that result from specifically located interpretations. She will also offer a research seminar in which she explores the resonances of the concept of the ‘global south’ for Shakespeare studies today and, in particular, ‘global’ Shakespeare.

Sandra comes to us from the English Department at the University of Cape Town where she convenes the Masters Program and teaches courses in Shakespeare studies, early-modern literature and thought, postcolonial theory, and African literature. Her first book, The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge (Ashgate, 2015) traces the emergence of the early modern global south. She has published articles on global Shakespeare (race in Othello, ‘recognizing’ Hamlet, the ‘Africanisation’ of The Tempest, ‘Shakespeare without borders’), early American colonial literature, race and the public sphere in nineteenth-century New York, and testimonial narratives in the aftermath of apartheid.