CHESTERTOWN, MD—On Wednesday, April 17, the Sophie Kerr Lecture Series at Washington College continues with “Shakespeare’s Spirit World,” a presentation by scholar Elizabeth Harvey on the conjunctions of air and gender in Shakespeare’s sonnets and four of his plays: Macbeth, King Lear, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. Her talk, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 4:30 p.m. in the Litrenta Lecture Hall of the John S. Toll Science Center on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

A professor of English at the University of Toronto, Harvey focuses her scholarship on early modern literature and culture, gender studies, and the history of medicine and midwifery. She has written two books—Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and Renaissance Texts (1992) and Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (2003)—and co-edited three others.  

She is at work on two books:  “Inscrutable Organs: Gender, Medicine, and Literature in Early Modern England,” and Sensational Subjects: The Rhetoric of Touch in Early Modern England.  Her April 17 talk is co-sponsored by the Washington College Department of Art and Art History and the Department of English.