2025-2026 Faculty Research Grant

Vanessa Corredera and L. Monique Pittman (English).

Shakespeare, Race, and Anglophone Popular Culture.

Shakespeare, Race, and Anglophone Popular Culture offers a theoretically robust interrogation of how the circulation of Shakespeare within popular culture modes and genres operates to craft, reify, and/or contest existing racial imaginaries.  Just as the study of race expands within Shakespeare studies, so too should the archives for analyzing Shakespeare and race grow. While it is now more common to consider race and embodiment in both early modern and contemporary Shakespearean performance and adaptation, pop culture remains underexplored and undertheorized. Given pop culture’s accessibility and far-reaching circulation, as an archive, it offers a range of interventions in “the Shakespearean” that contest hierarchies of difference and confront power disequilibriums. For some scholars, the casual and truncated quality of Shakespearean citations and transmutations or the broadly imagined, non-specialist target audiences make examining the intersections between Shakespeare, race, and popular culture a questionable endeavor. However, rigorous theoretical and methodological approaches can illuminate how pop culture uses Shakespeare to uphold, contest, and shape existing racial imaginaries for broad audiences. 

Chapters explore the tensions between the “low,” racialized status of a pop culture form and Shakespeare’s “high” status; the ways race informs a specific Shakespearean reference (in film, television, music, graphic novels, memes, etc.); and the influence loop between Shakespeare and the systemic racism of creative industries (Hollywood, book publishing, etc.).  This co-edited collection of essays thus examines the theories of both race and adaptation and appropriation that might help scholars and teachers better engage with Shakespeare, race, and pop culture. Chapters take a range of investigative approaches, some centering Shakespeare and others using Shakespeare to theorize pop culture, but all focusing on the ethical implications of the triangulation between Shakespeare, pop culture, and race