A Royal Shakespeare Company at Davidson Symposium
February 15–17, 2008

With featured speaker and playwright Edward Albee

Complete Schedule of Events

View the 2008 Symposium Brochure

Registration Details

Join the RSC and members of the Davidson College community for an engaging three days of workshops and seminars. The 2008 symposium will offer an integrated approach to Shakespeare through collaborations with the Theatre and English Departments.

The symposium will feature playwright Edward Albee. Speakers and panelists will include Mary Karen Dahl, Thomas Mallon, Phyllis Rackin, and Laurence Senelick.

The symposium is part of the 2008 RSC at Davidson Residency, running January 20 through February 17, featuring a Royal Shakespeare Company “work-in-progress” performance of a new play commissioned by the RSC and developed in association with Davidson College.

Edward Albee is an American playwright known for works including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Zoo Story, The Sandbox, The American Dream, and The Goat or Who is Sylvia. Albee has received three Pulitzer Prizes for drama for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), Three Tall Women (1994); a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement (2005); the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1980); as well as the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts (both in 1996). In 2005, Albee also received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre. The only other playwright to receive this honor was the late Arthur Miller.

Mary Karen Dahl is professor of theatre studies and head of the MA/PhD Theatre Studies Program at Florida State University. She has a longstanding interest in the relationship between performance and politics. She has written on the ethics of violence; theatre and terror; and theatre, citizenship, and the state. Her book Political Violence in Drama:  Classical Models, Contemporary Variations was selected a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1987. 

Thomas Mallon’s seven novels include Henry and Clara, Bandbox, and the recently published Fellow Travelers. The recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, as well as the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing, he has been the literary editor of Gentlemen’s Quarterly and has taught at Vassar College, George Washington University, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Phyllis Rackin is Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania and a former president of the Shakespeare Association of America. She has published numerous scholarly articles on Shakespeare and related subjects in anthologies and in such journals as PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Shakespeare-Jahrbuch. Her awards include an ACLS fellowship and a Lindback Award for distinguished teaching. 

Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory and Distinguished Scholar at Tufts University. He was awarded the George Jean Nathan award for dramatic criticism in 2001, and has received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. His many books include the award-winning The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance and The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre. 

You can also view the schedule of the 2007 symposium, Like an Old Tale Still: Shakespeare’s Late Plays.

Secure online registration form

For more information or to register, please contact Sherry Malushizky, Director of Artist Residency Programs, at shmalushizky@davidson.edu or by calling 704-894-2101.