Speakers

The Washington and Lee Department of Theater, Dance and Film will host Ben Crystal, British actor and producer, and Artistic Director of London-based Passion in Practice. Crystal is author of Shakespeare on Toast, Springboard Shakespeare, and co-author of Shakespeare's Words and The Shakespeare Miscellany, and is an expert in performing Shakespeare in original pronunciation.

The Washington and Lee University English Department will host prominent Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro of Columbia University, who will speak at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 12, at the University's Northen Auditorium.

The Washington and Lee University Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies will host Katharine Maus, James Branch Cabell Professor of English at the University of Virginia, for a lecture. Professor Maus is a renowned scholar on Shakespeare and English Renaissance drama, and the coordinator of the Virginia First Folio exhibition and related events on the UVA campus in October 2016.

Professor Ayanna Thompson, Professor of English at Georgetown University, will be the 2016 Phi Beta Kappa Convocation Speaker.

The W&L Department of History hosts noted Early Modern Historian Brian Levack from the University of Texas at Austin. He will speak at 4:30 pm on March 17 in Northen Auditorium in Leyburn Library on the W&L campus.

The Washington and Lee University Roger Mudd Center for Ethics hosts Quentin Skinner, Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary University of London, who will give a talk on Shakespeare. A world-renowned political philosopher with works on Machiavelli and Hobbes, Skinner's book, Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978) was named one of the hundred most influential books published since World War II. In 2014, he also published Forensic Shakespeare. His Shakespeare lecture will be part of his week-long residency at W&L under the auspices of the Mudd Center.