Shakespeare and Italy - Cultural Enrichment Class

From the sonnets to the Roman plays, from a tragedy in “fair Verona” to a comedy in Padua, come discover the world of Shakespeare and Italy in a 4-week class led by UH Professor Ann Christensen.

Thursdays, June 4, 11, 18 and 25, 2020 | 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

About Professor Ann Christensen:

Ann Christensen is happy to serve as the first woman chair of the UH English Department. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1991 and immediately accepted a position at the University of Houston to teach early modern literature and drama (including Shakespeare, Donne, Lady Mary Wroth, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and Christopher Marlowe). A faculty affiliate in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, and founding member of the Empire Studies Research Collective, Christensen approaches the period with gender and power in mind. Her first book, Separation Scenes: Domestic Drama in Early Modern England 1590-1630 (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) focuses on the changing perceptions and experiences of travel, commerce, and domesticity in England’s so called “age of commercial expansion.” Her second book, a modern critical edition of the anonymous 1599 play, A Warning for Fair Women, is forthcoming from Nebraska’s Early Modern Cultural Studies Series; the play was performed at Atlanta’s Shakespeare Tavern by the Resurgens Theatre Company in 2018. A regular presenter at the Shakespeare Association of America and Attending to Women in Early Modern Europe conferences, she has also contributed to the Forum on Women and Mercantilism in the Journal of Early Modern Women. The Teaching Shakespeare in Houston Project that Christensen co-leads with Laura Turchi offers programming and networking for area teachers who are interested in ways that Shakespeare can empower youth. She has been the faculty sponsor of the UH SHX Club and the UH Improv Club, The Profanimals.

Her work appears in Early Modern Studies Journal, Early Modern Literary Studies, Studies in English Literature, Marlowe Studies Annual, and Early Modern Women, as well as Gendered Routes and Spaces in the Early Modern World (Ashgate, 2015) and Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550-1700 (Palgrave, 2008).

The ICCC is funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.