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Shakespeare's Counter-Optics


On October 4 2022, I'll be giving a lecture at the University of Zurich called "Shakespeare's Counter-Optics." Here's a a short abstract to give you a sense of what I'll be talking about.


Vision and judgment have a vexed relationship. At once our most privileged and most mistrusted source of knowledge, the eyes have long been a site of both optimism and anxiety about the accessibility of spiritual, moral, legal, and scientific truth. In this talk, I reflect on how Shakespearean theater can help us “see anew,” to borrow a phrase from the historians of science Loraine Daston and Peter Galison. I discuss moments in a number of Shakespearean plays – Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Twelfth Night – all of which deal in one way or another with vision. What I suggest, finally, is that theater fosters a non-objective form of visual judgment, one that embraces interpretive risk and epistemological irrationalism. To put it in plainer language, I’m interested in the way Shakespearean theater models a version of vision-based judgment that can tolerate things being both one way and another way, both there and not there, both real and unreal. This kind of pluralism cannot be assimilated within mainstream traditions of scientific vision. Shakespeare, I propose, offers us a counter-optics in which judgment transforms what is logical and verifiable into what is impossible and wonderous, rather than the other way around.





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AWARDS & HONORS
RESEARCH (EXTERNAL ONLY)

Swiss National Science Foundation, Four-Year Collaborative Research Grant for “Theater and Judgment in Early Modern England,” 2021-25

 

Distinguished International Visiting Fellow, Australian Research Council’s Center for the History of Emotions, 2017

 

Short-Term Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, 2011

 

Pforzheimer Fellowship in Renaissance Studies at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, 2009      

 

Bibliographical Society of America Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, 2007        

 

FQRSC Collaborative Research Grant for the McGill Shakespeare and Performance Research Team, 2007-10

 

Francis Bacon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library, 2006

 

Short-Term Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, 2005

 

Richard H. Tomlinson Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, 2005-07, McGill University

 

Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Scholarship, 2001-05

 

TEACHING

Kesterson Award for Outstanding Graduate Teaching, 2012


Professor of the Year Award, 2012

© 2017 by Kevin Curran. 

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