Everything That Never Happened: Putting This Text Into Context

A discussion with University of Southern Florida, Associate Professor Lisa S. Starks. Lisa S. Starks is a Shakespearean and early modern British literature expert. Her main research interests include Shakespeare adaptation, cinema, Jewish studies, and Levinas; sexuality, violence, and trauma in Shakespeare and other Renaissance drama; early modern theatre and Ovid.

 

Starks has published widely in Shakespeare and related areas. Her book publications include an edited collection, Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre (Edinburgh University Press, 2019); a monograph, Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid (Palgrave, 2014); and two co-edited collections (with Courtney Lehmann), Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema (Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2002) and The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory (Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2002). She is currently writing a new monograph on Levinas, Shakespeare, and Adaptation. This book addresses the ways in which Emmanuel Levinas’s radical ethics provides a model to explore and promote compassionate “Shakespeares” and the power of the arts. 

 

Dr. Starks will join us to discuss Everything That Never Happened by Sarah Mantell. This play is a reimagining and a re-contextualization of William Shakespeare's The Merchant that considers notions of violence, identity and faith from Jessica and Shylock's perspective and their existence in a predominantly Christian world.