News

Folio Futures: Editing Early Modern Plays for Tomorrow’s Audiences, 26 April 2024

In celebration of Texas A&M University’s designation as the host institution for the New Variorum Shakespeare (NVS) and in continued commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, this symposium will convene 26 April 2024 to assess the history of and future possibilities for editing Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Traditionally, the editing of Shakespeare’s works has established the “best practices” that have been applied to early modern drama in general and provides the standards for digital humanities editions today. This symposium will bring together scholars of Shakespeare’s works, digital humanists, and representatives from the NVS to discuss the challenges and opportunities of editing in the twenty-first century for new global audiences who read, perform, and teach in a variety of media.

Invited participants (including TAMU faculty, staff, and graduate students) will be convened into round table sessions. They will present brief formal remarks on the symposium’s topic and discuss the future of editing early modern texts to meet the evolving needs of teachers, students, and scholars around the world and across media. In addition, there will be two longer keynote lectures—one to be delivered by an early-career scholar (Kristen Abbott Bennett) and another by an advanced scholar (Eric Rasmussen). This symposium is free and open to TAMU students, faculty, and staff, as well as to the general public. Beyond those who attend in person, Texas A&M University’s central position in modern Shakespearean scholarship and digital humanities will be showcased to an anticipated global audience through synchronous live streaming. Learn more about the Symposium and register Here.

Making Shakespeare: Dinner, Screening, and Presentation, 25 April 2024

The Early Modern Studies Working Group and the Medieval Studies Working Group will host a dinner and screening of the PBS documentary “Great Performances - Making Shakespeare: The First Folio” in the newly renovated Humanities Visualization Space on April 25th. After the screening, Eric Rasmussen will share his experiences of contributing to the documentary in his talk “Behind the Scenes of ‘Making Shakespeare.’” Learn more Here.

"Much Ado About Shakespeare: Department Of English Inherits Project 150 Years In The Making"

TAMU College of Arts and Sciences featured the NVS and the Folio Futures Symposium in a news article, titled "Much Ado About Shakespeare: Department Of English Inherits Project 150 Years In The Making." You can read the article Here.  

NVS Editors and Board Members to Attend SAA 2024

The Fifty-Second Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) is being held in Portland, Oregon from Wednesday, 10 April to Saturday, 13 April 2024. NVS contributors scheduled to present include Roberta Barker (volume editor for NVS A Midsummer Night’s Dream) will participate in the Measure for Measure and Its Cultural Currency Seminar on April 11th; Valerie Wayne (NVS Board) will participate in the Early Modern Book History: The State of the Field Seminar on April 11th; Michael Stapleton (volume editor for NVS Julius Caesar) will present his digital exhibit, shakedsetc.org: Historic Shakespeare Editions! on April 12th; Robert Stagg (NVS PI) will participate in the Shakespeare’s Poems in Context(s) Seminar on April 12th; Paul Werstine (NVS General Editor and volume editor for NVS Romeo and Juliet) will participate in the Whither Memorial Reconstruction? Seminar on April 13th; Lara Hansen-Morse (volume editor for NVS Richard III) will participate in the Shakespeare and Textual Failure Seminar on April 13th; and Dorothy Todd (NVS Associate Digital Editor) will participate in the Sensorium of Early Modern Science Seminar on April 13th. See the full conference shedule Here. 

The NVS Receives Funding for Undergraduate Professional and Research Experience Program (UPREP)

Each semester, the Department of English selects 5-7 faculty projects for the UPREP program, which pairs undergraduate English majors with faculty members on selected projects outside of the classroom. Student involvement can range from working as an editorial or research assistant to aiding in the preparation for an academic conference. The Undergraduate Studies Committee voted on and approved funding for the NVS research proposal titled “Building Digital Editions of the New Variorum Shakespeare.” Grace Hoelscher will be working with Dr. Kris May, Dr. Katayoun Torabi, and Dr. Dorothy Todd on all aspects of digital editing for the NVS project during the Spring 2024 semester. 

NVS General Editor Dr. Eric Rasmussen Featured in First Folio PBS Documentary

NVS General Editor, NVS Hamlet Volume Editor, and Regents Teaching Professor and Foundation Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno Dr. Eric Rasmussen appears in the PBS documentary "Great Performances - Making Shakespeare: The First Folio,” which airs in College Station on November 17, 2023. Click on the above image to watch the trailer and access the episode Here.

The Christian Science Monitor Interviews NVS General Editor Dr. Eric Rasmussen

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of the printing of Shakespeare's First Folio, the Christan Science Monitor interviewed NVS General Editor Dr. Eric Rasmussen, in an article titled "Uncovering Shakespeare’s rare First Folios – paw prints and all." Eric Rasmussen who has been called "the Robert Langdon of the Shakespearean world" by the Washington Post "has traveled the globe to investigate and authenticate Shakespeare First Folios." His work has been featured the New York Times, USA Today, The Guardian, NPR, CNN, the BBC, and will be showcased in an upcoming PBS Great Performances documentary later this month. To learn more about some of Eric's most interesting finds, read the article Here.

Dr. Scott Kleinman Joins the NVS Team as Associate Technical Editor

Scott Kleinman, Professor of English at California State University, Northridge joins the NVS team as Associate Technical Editor in order develop visualization tools for the NVS. Scott specializes in Old and Middle English literature and the Digital Humanities. His Digital Humanities work includes the NEH-Funded Lexomics Project, which studies literature using digital methods and produces the computational text analysis tool Lexos. Scott will work with NVS Technical Editor Bryan Tarpley to integrate Lexos so that users can produce word clouds, bubble graphs, word counts, dendrograms, and similarity queries within and across NVS plays. Click Here to read learn more about the Lexomics project.

NVS Team Update

The New Variorum Shakespeare project welcomes two new student researchers to the team for this academic year, Andrew Hoyt (Applied Mathematics with a Computer Science emphasis, Undergraduate) and Fernando Gonzalez Torres (Industrial Engineering, Undergraduate), and welcomes back Jade Gooden (Anthropology, Undergraduate). The NVS team wishes to thank outgoing student researchers, Mounika Balivada (CS, Graduate) and Shyam Prasad Nagulavancha (CS, Graduate), who will be starting new positions in their department as graduate research assistants. 

2023-24 English Department Tenure Track Search to Include Position for New NVS PI

As part of the English Department’s effort to build a strong early modern program at A&M, two assistant professors in early modern studies will be hired for tenure track positions that begin next fall. One of the two positions requires specialization in early modern drama studies with particular interests in Shakespeare and/or digital humanities in order to serve as the New Variorum Shakespeare project’s Principal Investigator (PI). The new PI will publicize and build a scholarly community around the NVS and its development of both open-access texts and open-source digital tools and will work closely with the Digital Editor of the NVS to raise visibility and increase the scholarly impact of the project. Read more about the positions Here.