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On Friday 10 October, Stan Reiner van Zon will defend his PhD dissertation 'Challenging Global Shakespeare: Non-Anglo-American Shakespeare in Anglophone Academic Discourse, 1970s-2010s'. In his thesis, he explores academic research into the global dissemination of the cultural phenomenon called ‘Shakespeare’.

Global Shakespeare scholarship

For centuries, the historical figure of William Shakespeare and the literary works attributed to him have been world famous. Since its emergence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, academic Shakespeare scholarship has investigated Shakespeare’s reception in cultures from around the world.

For much of this history, British and American approaches to Shakespeare have held a privileged position within the discipline. From the 1990s onwards, however, this dominance has been increasingly questioned. Prominent scholars such as Dennis Kennedy, Dirk Delabastita, Lieven D’hulst, Martin Orkin, and Ania Loomba have criticised Anglo-American Shakespeare scholarship for its ignorance of and disinterest in Shakespeare as produced beyond their own national and linguistic borders.

Van Zon’s dissertation demonstrates that research devoted to non-Anglo-American Shakespeare has indeed been systematically marginalised, and he reveals some of the problematic consequences this has had for the field. His work traces four decades of global Shakespeare scholarship, from the late 1970s through to the early 2010s.