CHESTERTOWN, MD—The Sophie Kerr Lecture Series hosts University of Michigan professor of English Steven Mullaney on September 21 to deliver a lecture titled  “’Do You See This?’ The Politics of Attention in Shakespearean Tragedy.” Free and open to the public, the event will begin at 4:30 p.m. in the Rose O’Neill Literary House, 407 Washington Avenue.  

Mullaney, who holds a Ph.D. from Stanford, focuses his scholarship on renaissance drama, mainly Shakespeare, whom he writes about in his newly published book, “The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare.” Previously he wrote “The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Elizabethan England.” 

Mullaney was featured in the documentary project, “Shakespeare is,” in which he says, “Theater is the most social of the arts. It only happens finally in performance and the audience is an important component in the final work of art… theater tends to be most respondent to historical changes, cultural changes, different needs that different cultures have.” He is now participating in a multi-disciplinary project at McGill University called “Early Modern Conversions: Religions, Cultures, Ecologies.”