This conference, held as part of the thirteenth triennial congress of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa (SSOSA), invites delegates to reflect on and utilise the axes of space and time in making new contributions to the field of Shakespeare Studies.
Keynote Speaker: Farah Karim-Cooper (Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC)
Where is ‘here’ ? In thinking about place (or from and with place) when engaging with Shakespeare’s work, we may prioritise the local over the global: from investigating the resonances of site-specific performances, to studying material histories of production, reception and circulation; from discerning the settings embedded in or revealed by adaptations and translations, to exploring Shakespeare’s role in education in particular communities. But what are the limits of foregrounding the local? How do we steer between a narrow parochialism and inflated claims about Shakespearean universality?
At the same time, looking beyond concerns of specific locales prompts us to explore shared questions and experiences that engage and transcend our spatial boundaries. How do the politics of place and space shape our grasp of social justice in Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, and their negotiations of race, gender, class, disability and other forms of identity formation? What is the relationship between Shakespeare and nationality/nationalism in post- or neo-colonial contexts? What popular forces shape the way Shakespearean ‘spaces’ – touristic, theatrical, or otherwise – are marked and marketed, and how? And what about scenes and spaces in the plays themselves? As we confront environmental crises, how can Shakespeare’s settings illuminate our connections with the natural and non-human world?
If we ask, What is Shakespeare now?, we are asking: what does Shakespeare ‘now’ look like, and how did we (as scholars, theatre practitioners, and educators) arrive here? Where and to whom does Shakespeare now belong? How are new technological realities, including the expansion of AI use, reconfiguring our engagements with Shakespeare? In what ways does Shakespeare offer us a means for addressing recent ‘global’ events, whether military, political, environmental or other? And how have these events advanced or redirected our handling of his works today?
To venture answers to these presentist questions, we may turn further to historical (and geographical) enquiry to consider histories of empire and of race, mapping the ‘spread’ of Shakespeare – or indeed to the histories represented in Shakespeare’s plays and poems, as well as their pre-histories and backstories. This turn might also extend our attention, in some instances, to studies of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, both in England and elsewhere in the early modern world.
Finally, questions of futurity allow us to unify the spatio-temporal framework to pose a wider question of ‘Shakespeare from here’. For Shakespeare as a scholarly field, as a performed phenomenon, as a creative spur, or as a fixture in the classroom, we ask: Where to from here?
Submissions:
We welcome submissions for 20-minute individual papers or combined presentations/panels that stretch, complicate, conflate, disentangle, and/or refine understandings of ‘here-ness’ and ‘now-ness’ to consider their bearings on Shakespeare.
To propose a paper, please submit an abstract of up to 250 words along with a brief bio to shakespeare@ru.ac.za by 24 September 2026.
Proposals for panels or alternative programme items may be sent to the co-convenors, Hassana Moosa and Chris Thurman.
In addition to the conference, the SSOSA Congress events will include workshops and performances in both Cape Town and Johannesburg in May 2027.
Keynote Speaker:
Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper is the eighth director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. Prior to joining the Folger, Dr. Karim-Cooper was Professor of Shakespeare Studies, King’s College London, and Director of Education (Higher Education & Research) at Shakespeare’s Globe, where she worked for 20 years. She has published over 40 chapters in books, reviews, and articles, as well as several books on Shakespeare, theatre, performance and culture, including: Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh University Press, 2006, revised ed. 2019), The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (Arden, 2016), and Great White Bard: Shakespeare, Race and the Future (2023), which was voted top 100 books of 2023 by Time Magazine, NPR and The New Yorker. Her most recent book, All the World’s Your Stage: Shakespeare for Today, is written specifically for children ages 9-12 and was published in November 2025 by DK Publishers in the UK and Penguin Random House in the United States.
“Shakespeare Here, Shakespeare Now” is supported by South Africa’s National Research Foundation, the University of Cape Town and the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre (University of the Witwatersrand).