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Caxton Club & Howard Wilson Prize Announcements: Beth Charlebois

May 15 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Old Main, Alumni Room

This event is open to the public.

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Beth Charlebois received her B.A. (Government) and M.A. (English) from Georgetown University and her Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University where she specialized in English Renaissance Drama. Her early research explored the intersection between representations of jealousy in Renaissance drama and questions of belief in post-reformation England, but her more recent writing and teaching focus on Shakespeare and performance. Beth lectures and leads workshops for The Chicago Shakespeare Theater for whom she established the Preamble lecture series, now a mainstay of the theater’s educational programming. A recipient of the Homer L. Dodge Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Junior Faculty Member, Professor Charlebois is especially passionate about her seminar, “Staging Shakespeare,” where students perform scenes from Shakespeare’s plays informed by historical research and early modern staging practices, a course that was inspired by her own participation in an NEH institute, “Shakespeare’s Playhouses: Inside and Out.”

Beth’s professional work is increasingly devoted to the ways in which literature and drama may serve the public good and address issues of social justice. She served as The Scholar-in-Residence for Prison Performing Arts in St. Louis and is currently working with the organization while on sabbatical, developing a hip hop adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet at a men’s maximum security prison in Bowling Green, MO and leading a creative writing workshop at a women’s correctional center in Vandalia, MO. Both Hip Hop Hamlet and The Vandalia Monologues were produced in February 2015. She teaches at St. Mary’s College of Maryland where she is Associate Professor of English.

Professor Charlesbois is serving as our judge for our annual Howard Wilson Prizes in Literary Criticism. Following her lecture, she’ll award this year’s prizes.