Professor Catherine Richardson’s Inaugural Lecture

MEMS is delighted to announce that Professor Catherine Richardson’s inaugural lecture, ‘local things for local people’?: Provincialism, Cultural Value, Shakespeare will be held in Grimond Lecture Theatre 1 from 18:00 on Wednesday 14 November. All are welcome and the event will be followed by a reception in Grimond Foyer. Please register at the following Eventbrite page.

In her inaugural lecture, Professor Catherine Richardson will explore connections and disparities between metropolitan and provincial cultures. She will ponder our often-pejorative sense of the differences between the two – between horizons, patterns of life, ways of thinking and valuing, and especially levels of creativity and the balance between cultural production and consumption. As these are rather large questions to answer in an hour, she will concentrate on the situation in early modern England, and on Shakespeare’s impact on these questions from then to the present. Along the way, there will be the opportunity to ponder travel, material culture, re-telling old tales, and how it might be that the speaker finds herself back in Kent, writing again about the same old play twenty years after her first attempts to understand it.

The lecture will take place in Grimond Lecture Theatre 1 from 18:00 and will be followed by a drinks reception in the Grimond Foyer.

Professor Richardson came to the University of Kent in 2007 from the University of Birmingham, where she was lecturer in English and History and Fellow of The Shakespeare Institute. She is interested in the relationship between texts and the material circumstances of their production and consumption and has published widely on the subject of early modern material culture.