Events

Julia Reinhard Lupton
Shakespeare’s Virtues: A Humanifesto (poster)
Friday, March 2, 2018, 3:45-6:00pm
Distinguished Alumni Room, Indiana Memorial Union

Click here for access to Julia Lupton’s talk and the roundtable panelists’ prepared remarks.

The lecture will be followed by a roundtable with IU students and faculty on “ Virtue, Now,” featuring Joan Pong Linton (English), Jonathan Elmer (English & CAHI), Jonathan Van Hecke (senior, Finance & French), Matthew Graham (PhD Student, Religious Studies), and Patricia Ingham (English).

ABSTRACT: Courage, judgment, trust, hope, and patience are among the virtues cultivated by Shakespeare’s plays, which dramatize virtue as both creative practice and serious play. Shakespeare’s characters enact their virtues not as fixed moral prescriptions but as open-ended and experimental human capacities in scenes where the opportunities to exercise virtue are unevenly distributed among different social players. From swimming and dancing in Twelfth Night to trust exercises in King Lear, Shakespeare’s inquiries into the power and promise of responsive interaction with other people and the environment offer resources for contemporary learning and life.

Julia Reinhard Lupton (Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Associate Dean for Research in the School of Humanities, UC Irvine) is a leading scholar of Shakespeare and early modernity widely construed, and recipient of research fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the ACLS in addition to multiple recognitions of her commitment to teaching and public humanities including the Edward Lynton Award for Scholarship and Public Life in 2005. Her publications include Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (Chicago, 2011), Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago, 2005) and Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, 1996), while Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs For The Theater Of Life is forthcoming (Chicago, April 2018). She is also Faculty Director of “Illuminations: The Chancellor’s Arts and Culture Initiative” and of Humanities Common at UC Irvine, and Co-Director of the UCI Shakespeare Center.

Julia Lupton’s visit to Bloomington is made possible through the support of the College Arts and Humanities Institute, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities, and Departments of Comparative Literature, English, French and Italian, and Religious Studies. The event will be followed by a reception.