Dr. Corredera and Dr. Pittman Collaborate to Publish a new Book!

Dr. Vanessa I. Corredera (BA English with Honors, 2006) and Dr. L. Monique Pittman (BA English with Honors, 1991) have published a new essay collection with Bloomsbury press under the Arden Shakespeare imprint, Shakespeare, Race and Anglophone Popular Culture (2026). Originating as a Shakespeare Association of American seminar in 2023, the collection brings together essays treating Shakespeare appearances in popular culture artifacts. The collection theorizes the intersections between race, Shakespearean adaptation and pop culture. Chapters take a range of investigative approaches, some centering Shakespeare and others using Shakespeare to theorize pop culture, but all focusing on the ethical implications of the triangulation between Shakespeare, pop culture and race.

As the analysis of race expands within Shakespeare studies, so too, this collection argues, should the archives for analyzing Shakespeare and race grow. The collection demonstrates that rigorous theoretical and methodological approaches can illuminate how pop culture uses Shakespeare to uphold, contest and shape existing racial imaginaries for broad audiences.

The culmination of years of friendship and collaboration, this collection is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Pittman’s mother, Maxine Dowden Pittman (1939 – 2025), and “To the consolations of friendship: ‘But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, / All losses are restored and sorrows end.’”