Organizer Bios
Ian Smith
Ian Smith is the Richard and Joan Sell Professor in the Humanities at Lafayette College in the department of English where he teaches courses in Shakespeare and early modern drama, early modern and critical race studies, and sexuality. He is the author of Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (2009) and collaborator on Othello Re-imagined in Sepia (2012). His work on Shakespeare and early modern drama has been published in several anthologies and journals. His research interests include “racial blindspots” and conventions of reading Shakespeare; barbarism and linguistic racialism; rethinking Shakespeare’s contemporary relevance through the notion of race and the “practical humanities”; and early modern racial impersonation (blackface theater) and ontologies of blackness. He is currently preparing a book on Shakespeare and race titled Black Shakespeare.
Ian Smith
Richard and Joan Sell Professor of the Humanities
English
303 Pardee Hall
(610) 330-5568
smithi@lafayette.edu
Diane Windham Shaw
Diane Windham Shaw has directed special collections at Lafayette College since 1985 and served as College archivist from 1987-2017. In 2016, she was co-curator of an exhibition at Grolier Club in New York City on the Marquis de Lafayette and the antislavery movement; she was also co-editor and essayist for the accompanying catalog, A True Friend of the Cause. In 2019 her essay “‘Two Youths (Slaves) of Great Promise’: The Education of David and Washington McDonogh at Lafayette College, 1838-1844” was published in Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press).
Diane Shaw
Director of Special Collections & College Archives
Libraries
209C Skillman Library
(610) 330-5401
shawd@lafayette.edu