Andrews Research Conference Public Lectures

The plenary sessions of the 3^rd Annual Andrews Research Conference: Early Career Researchers and Creative Scholars in the Arts and Humanities will be held on Wednesday, May 4, 2016 at 7:00 pm and Thursday, May 5, 2016 at 7:30 pm. Both presentations will take place in Newbold Auditorium and are free and open to the public.

On Wednesday, May 4, Dr. L. Monique Pittman, Andrews University Professor of English and Director of Honors, will speak on the topic of “Color-Conscious Casting and Multicultural Britain in the BBC Henry V (2012): Historicizing Adaptation in an Age of Digital Placelessness.” Her abstract is as follows:

“Four hundred years after the death of William Shakespeare, the playwright’s works and their afterlives occupy an uncontested position as signifiers of cultural value. However, those same works as instruments of an Anglo-White hegemony also shorthand enduring contestations over which cultural identities enjoy power. Throughout its adaptational history, Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599) has long telegraphed British imperial might. Produced within the framework of the Cultural Olympiad that coincided with both the London Olympics and the Queen’s Jubilee, the BBC’s Hollow Crown Henry V (2012) wrestles with the status of multicultural British identity in the post-Great Recession and post-9/11 climate. Henry V (directed by Thea Sharrock) raises questions by casting in an otherwise all-White film one non-Caucasian, Paterson Joseph, as the Duke of York. That the Duke of York is played by the only actor of color in the film burdens the role with new pressures of representation and interacts in troubling ways with the policies of British multiculturalism and the trope of the Magical Negro in Hollywood film-making.”

On Thursday, May 5, Dr. David Trim, Director of the General Conference Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research, will speak on the topic of “America’s favourite sect? The afterlife of the Huguenots: in the visual arts, literature, drama, music, and the movies.” His abstract is as follows:

“The Huguenots, France’s Calvinist minority, faced fierce persecution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which eventually drove them entirely underground. But they experienced a remarkable afterlife in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They became a focus for interest among historians, genealogists and Protestant apologists, but they also become the subject of extraordinary attention from creative artists: painters, poets, playwrights, novelists, composers, dramatists and movie directors. This paper explores the richness of artistic sources on the Huguenots, partly as a model for how scholars can bring together all the disciplines represented at the early-career researchers’ conference, and how interdisciplinary research can enrich scholarship.”

For more information about the Andrews Research Conference, please visit our website.