Stavreva elected to European Shakespeare Research Association board

Professor of English Kirilka Stavreva was recently elected to the Executive Board of the European Shakespeare Research Association.

The organization is a scholarly forum that supports research into Shakespeare as a cultural presence in Europe and the relationship between this presence and the construction of European culture and identity.

For the biennial conference of the association in Rome, in July 2019, Stavreva and Theatre and Performance Arts Professor Francesca Rayner (Universidade do Minho, Portugal) organized the seminar “Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions.” The 14 seminar participants included scholars and theatre professionals from Australia, Chile, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. For the seminar, Stavreva also presented a paper she co-authored with Professor Boika Sokolova (University of Notre Dame in London) on “Gender and the Space of Tragedy in Liliya Abadjieva’s Othello (2005)”—an all-male production experimenting with elements of the burlesque to push the limits of the tragic.

Other summer activities included developing a course called Books That Come to Life for the One Course Summer Institute and participating in a workshop, 5 days, 5 techniques, led by celebrated Austrian bookbinder Bernhard Sanders at the Centro del Bel Libro in Ascona, Switzerland.