Through the support of a FORWARD mentor travel award, Verena Theile, assistant professor of English, spent the summer at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbuettel, Germany, where she completed work on a collaborative project, “Performance and medicine in the writings of three early modern physicians: the brothers Felix and Thomas Platter and Hippolytus Guarinonius” by M.A. Katritzky of The Open University. Theile and Katritzky translated middle-high German travel literature by the brothers Platter and Guarinonius into English.
During her stay in Europe, Theile also participated in the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress in Prague from July 17-22. Since the first meeting of Shakespeare scholars from around the world, the congress has convened every five years and has been held on four continents. Past sites include Stratford-upon-Avon; Berlin; Valencia; Tokyo; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; and Brisbane. This year’s gathering presented participants with an international, culturally rich, academic environment that placed special emphasis on Shakespeare’s European reception, the impact his work on intercultural communication and the roles it has played in national emancipation.
Theile’s paper, “By the pricking of my thumbs/Something wicked this way comes: Demonizing Macbeth,” is forthcoming as part of the seminar proceedings. The paper is part of Theile’s ongoing research on the supernatural in the early modern period. Her own edited collection, with Andrew McCarthy of the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, titled “Staging the Superstitions of Early Modern Europe,” is under contract and forthcoming with Ashgate Publishing.