History's Hollow Men: Manufacturing Blackness in Love's Labour's Lost.

We’re delighted that the seventh annual King’s Gollancz Lecture will be delivered by Professor Ian Smith. The lecture be hosted in the Edmond J. Safra Lecture Theatre at King’s on Thursday 26 October at 7.15pm. The lecture will also be live-streamed for those unable to join in person.

Register to attend in-person here.
Register for the live-stream here.

History's Hollow Men: Manufacturing Blackness in Love's Labour's Lost.
For modern audiences and readers, “blackface” conjures up images we have come to associate mostly with nineteenth-century American blackface minstrelsy. The early modern English stage tradition introduces us to a different set of practices and blackface technologies. The talk will examine the use of these non-cosmetic prosthetics and their relation to conceptions of blackness in modernity by way of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Ian Smith is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race and Rhetoric in Renaissance England: Barbarian Errors (2009) and collaborator on Othello Re-imagined in Sepia (2012). His most recent monograph Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race was published by Cambridge UP (2022). He is the recipient of multiple fellowships in support of his scholarship and most recently held the Los Angeles Times chair in the History and Culture of the Americas at the Huntington Library (2022-23). He is currently the President of the Shakespeare Association of America.

The annual King’s Gollancz Lecture celebrates the life and work of former King’s Professor of English Sir Israel Gollancz, medievalist, Shakespearean and founding member of both the British Academy and the English Association. The lecture is organised by three of the centres of the AHRI – Shakespeare Centre London (SCL), the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies (CLAMS) and the Centre for Early Modern Studies (CEMS) – in rotation; this year it is the turn of SCL.