David Sterling Brown | Negotiating Whiteness: Shakespeare Studies, Digital Humanities, and Popular Culture

This is an Archive of a Past Event See post-event content below.

During this talk, David Sterling Brown—Associate Professor of English at Trinity College (Hartford, CT), his alma mater—will introduce the two key theories from his new book Shakespeare’s White Others (Cambridge University Press). Building on sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois’ interracial color-line theory outlined in The Souls of Black Folk and on sound studies scholar Dr. Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s sonic color line theory introduced in The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, Brown’s “intraracial color-line” and “white other” concepts enable a broad audience of readers to see what they have not yet seen: how Shakespeare others and polices whiteness in his dramatic literature through the perpetuation of distinctions between ideal and less-than-ideal whiteness. Through his scholarly intervention, Brown explores intraracial tensions within racial whiteness that depend on sustaining anti-Blackness—with or without the presence of somatically Black people.

The day after his lecture, on March 7, Brown will join us at the Center for two more events:

About the Speaker

David Sterling Brown is an associate professor in Trinity College’s English Department, where he teaches Shakespeare, English Renaissance drama, and critical race studies. In 2021, he received a prestigious Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship that facilitated his yearlong residency with New York Times bestselling author Claudia Rankine’s The Racial Imaginary Institute, of which he remains a full-time Curatorial Team member. In the fall of 2023, Brown launched a virtual-reality art gallery—the David Sterling Brown Gallery—and exhibition—“Visualizing Race Virtually”—specifically devoted to exploring Shakespeare, race, gender, racialized sound, and more through Folger Library digital image resources. The art exhibition is an interactive, immersive visual complement to his new book Shakespeare’s White Others (Cambridge University Press). Currently, Brown is working on various new research projects, including some shorter essays and his second book titled Hood Pedagogy, which will be published by Cambridge University Press.

Explore More

Shakespeare's White Others (audiobook), narrated by David Sterling Brown

To See, or Not to See?: Shakespeare, Whiteness, and the Intraracial Color-Line

Visualizing Race Virtually: Exploring the Art of Shakespeare

About the Series

All This Rising: The Humanities in the Next Ten Years features ideas and methods that will mark new paths for the humanities in the next decade. Visitors consider the motives and conventions of their work in progress, how it converses with its discipline, and what it portends for the humanities.

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