Hough Lecture to Discuss Shakespeare, Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Film

Sharon O'Dair will deliver the 2016 Hough Lecture,  "Post-Apocalyptic Global Shakespeare: King Lear, The King is Alive, and Station Eleven," this coming Monday, April 4, at 5 p.m in the Dudley Bailey Library (Andrews Hall room 288). The talk is free and open to the public.

In her lecture, Professor O'Dair will explore ecocritical dystopias past, present, and future, as presented in Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear and two works inspired by the play. The first is the Kristian Levring film The King is Alive, released in 2000, which was set in the Namibian Desert, and shot in accordance with Dogme 95's practices. The second is Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel's recent best-selling futuristic novel, which follows a theatrical troupe on tour after a catastrophic pandemic.

Sharon O'Dair is Hudson Strode Professor of English and director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. She has published widely on Early Modern Literary Culture, Shakespeare and Ecocriticism, Shakespeare and Film, and Class and Labor Issues in Academia. Her books include Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars (U of Michigan P, 2000) and, with D. L. Miller and H. Weber, The Production of English Renaissance Culture (Cornell UP, 1994).