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USD College of Arts & Sciences:
Scholars in Conversation

in conjunction with the South Dakota Shakespeare Festival

Saturday, June 8, 2019, 3pm

Prentis Park, Vermillion SD

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What makes A Midsummer Night's Dream a perennial favorite? How does Shakespeare's fantasy world of mixed-up lovers speak to us now?

Enhance your viewing experience of

A Midsummer Night's Dream. Join an engaging discussion with Travis Williams (Univ. of Rhode Island) and Darlene Farabee (Univ. of South Dakota) who key us in on fascinating elements of this magical play.

All you need is a picnic blanket, lawn chairs and your curiosity for this lively, free conversation.

About the Presenters

Travis D. Williams (University of Rhode Island)

Travis D. Williams is Associate Professor of English and Department Chair at the University of Rhode Island. He specializes in the relationship of Renaissance literature to contemporaneous mathematical cultures, and is completing a book on that subject. He is the co-editor, with Russ McDonald and Nicholas D. Nace, of Shakespeare Up Close: Reading Early Modern Texts (London: Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2012). A winner of the Rhetorica Prize from the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, he has published essays on Shakespeare’s reading of Montaigne, the bibliography of Renaissance mathematical books, the methodology of studying mathematics as a cultural practice, mathematical subjectivity, the rhetoric of mathematical notation, and recent critical and performance interpretations of Much Ado About Nothing.

Darlene Farabee (University of South Dakota)

Darlene Farabee is Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at University of South Dakota. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from University of Delaware. Farabee teaches Shakespeare and other British literature of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries. She has also taught courses on twentieth-century drama. She has published essays on a range of early modern texts from Christopher Marlowe’s plays to Milton’s Paradise Lost.  She co-edited and contributed to Early Modern Drama in Performance (2015) and her book Shakespeare’s Staged Spaces and Playgoers’ Perceptions (2014) is available from Palgrave Macmillan. Farabee won the College of Arts and Sciences’ Schwartz Distinguished Faculty Award (2017) and serves on the board of the South Dakota Humanities Council.