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Visiting scholar to discuss Shakespeare's works

Oct. 7, 2008

KALAMAZOO--A leading scholar in the application of cognitive theory to the study of Shakespeare's plays will visit Western Michigan University Thursday, Oct. 9, as part of the Department of English's Scholarly Speaker Series.

Dr. Mary Crane, professor of English at Boston College, will speak on "Roman World, Egyptian Earth: Cognitive Difference and Empire in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra," at 7 p.m. The free public event will take place in 3025 Brown Hall.

Her published work tries to answer questions such as what Shakespeare might have been thinking when he developed a certain character or dramatic effect, or when he chose to use a word that had particularly weighty connotations in his time. She also has analyzed what people think when they read or watch one of his plays.

Crane received a bachelor's in Classics and English in 1979 and a doctorate in English in 1986 from Harvard University. She is the author of "Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England" (Princeton, 1993) and "Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory" (Princeton, 2001). She teaches courses on Shakespeare, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, and other areas of early modern British literature and culture.

For more information, contact Anthony Ellis at anthony.ellis@wmich.edu or (269) 387-2606.

Media contact: Deanne Molinari, (269) 387-8400, deanne.molinari@wmich.edu

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