Jonathan Bate, PhD, one of the world’s leading scholars of Shakespeare, will discuss “Shakespeare at 450 Years” at 2:30 p.m. Monday, April 7, in Hurst Lounge, Duncker Hall, at Washington University in St. Louis.
Bate, who is well known as a biographer, critic, broadcaster and scholar, is provost of Worcester College and professor of English literature at the University of Oxford.
His lecture, which is sponsored by the Department of English in Arts & Sciences, is free and open to the public.
“The range of Professor Bate’s work is astonishing,” said Wolfram M. Schmidgen, PhD, professor and chair of English. “He is not only one of the leading Shakespeareans of his generation, but also is one of our most influential scholars of ecocriticism, which analyzes the representation of nature and the environment in literature.”
Bate’s wide-ranging research interests also include Renaissance literature, Romanticism, biography and life writing, contemporary poetry and theater history.
He is a fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, as well as an honorary fellow of St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge.
A governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Bate broadcasts regularly for the BBC, writes for The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph, and has held visiting posts at Yale University and the University of California, Los Angeles.
In 2006, Bate was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s 80th Birthday Honours for his services to higher education. He is currently vice president (leading the humanities) of the British Academy.
His latest works include “Being Shakespeare,” a one-man play for Simon Callow, which toured nationally and internationally. He was consultant curator for the British Museum’s major Shakespeare exhibition for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad.
His studies of Shakespeare include “Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination,” “Shakespearean Constitutions” and “The Genius of Shakespeare.”
For more information on the lecture, contact 314-935-5190.