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THE GUNN LECTURE

IAN SMITH
(Professor of English, Lafayette College)

Blackness and Moral Compromise

MON, OCT 24, 4:30 PM
HALL CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES

Race dominates everyday speech, media headlines, and public policy, but questions of race in Shakespeare are resisted, despite the clear evidence of Shakespeare and other playwrights’ interest in calling attention to racialized blackness. The result is a “moral compromise” so that significant parts of Shakespeare’s texts are elided, misconstrued, or otherwise rendered invisible by readers who have ignored the presence of race in early modern England. In this lecture, Ian Smith reopens the inquiry into the reader—more pointedly, the “racialized reader”—to address the influence of systemic whiteness on the interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays.

Ian Smith is the Richard H., Jr. ’60 and Joan K. Sell Professor in the Humanities in the department of English at Lafayette College. He is the author of Race and Rhetoric in Renaissance England: Barbarian Errors and collaborator on Othello Re-imagined in Sepia. His most recent monograph Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race has been published by Cambridge UP. He is the recipient of multiple fellowships in support of his scholarship and currently holds the Los Angeles Times chair in the History and Culture of the Americas at the Huntington Library. He is also the Vice President of the Shakespeare Association of America.


The Gunn Lecture was endowed by the late Richard W. Gunn, brother of James Gunn, KU professor emeritus of English and founding director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction.

Sponsored by the Department of English and the Hall Center for the Humanities.

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