Hope College will celebrate William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes with presentations by two invited speakers and multiple Hope students on Thursday, Nov. 3, in the Martha Miller Center for Global Communication.
The two renowned writers lived at the same time but did not know each other. Both died 400 years ago this year.
The public is invited to the events. Admission is free.
Dr. Sarah Gretter of Michigan State University will open the celebration at 3 p.m. with the address “The Reality of Fiction in the 21st Century: Lessons from Cervantes.” Gretter’s teaching, scholarly writings, and public scholarship bridge the gap between literary thinking and social media. Her publications involve a humanities-centered approach to technology. She was recently invited to Twitter Headquarters to talk about the implications of her work for digital citizenship.
Gretter’s paper will be followed by five brief presentations by Hope students at 4 p.m.
After a break across dinner time, Dr. David Bevington of the University of Chicago, who is an internationally renowned scholar of Shakespeare, will lecture on “Shakespeare and Cervantes” at 7:30 p.m. Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Professor of English Emeritus at the university and has had a long career of distinguished teaching, academic leadership and scholarly publishing. He is internationally known for his edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works, now in its seventh issue. He has also published a well-regarded anthology of medieval drama, and many scholarly monographs, collections of essays and articles in academic journals.
The Martha Miller Center for Global Communication is located at 257 Columbia Ave., on Columbia Avenue at 10th Street.