In Conversation on Laura Seymour’s Book, Shakespeare and Neurodiversity

Tuesday 26 November 2024, 12.30pm

Seminar Room, Radcliffe Humanities Building

All welcome

For online attendance only, please register via Eventbrite.

Registration closes 2 hours before the start of the event. You will be sent the joining link within 24 hours of the event, on the day and once again 15 minutes before the event starts.

Join Laura Seymour and Gillian Woods in conversation on Laura’s new book, Shakespeare and Neurodiversity, which is part of the series Elements in Shakespeare and Pedagogy edited by Gillian Woods and Liam E. Semler Content Listing (cambridge.org). It argues that the Shakespeare classroom should be a place where neurodivergent learners flourish. This Element addresses four key areas: questions of reasonable adjustments, the pace of learning, the issue of diagnosis, and Shakespearean neurodivergent futures in education. Throughout, the Element provides activities and theoretical explanations to enable students and educators to understand how these four areas of Shakespeare education have often been underpinned by ableism, but can now become sources of neurodivergent flourishing.

Biographies:

Laura Seymour is currently a Research Associate at Birkbeck, University of London, where she gained her PhD in 2015 with a thesis on gesture and cognition in Shakespeare's plays. From January 2025 she is PI of the project "AMEND - Early Modern Neurodivergence" at Swansea University funded by a six-year Wellcome Trust Career Development Award. Her previous project, "New Understandings of Hamlet"--focusing on reading Shakespeare's Hamlet with people who have lived experiences of neurodivergence, mental illness, and suicidal ideation--was funded by the British Academy. With Siân Grønlie, she set up the project Neurodiversity at Oxford in 2021. She is also the author of Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and is working on two new books: a single-authored Europe-wide study of early modern neurodivergence, and a book called The Sedentary Renaissance co-authored with Dr Eva Lauenstein and under contract with Brill.

Gillian Woods is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in English at Magdalen College, joining from Birkbeck, University of London, where she was Reader in Renaissance Literature and Theatre. She works on Early Modern Drama and Theatricality. Her first book, Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions (OUP, 2013) was awarded Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award 2014 and investigated the Reformation’s impact on theatre; her current Leverhulme-funded monograph, Renaissance Theatricalities, shows how stagecraft shapes character, genre and political meaning. She is also a General Editor of the Cambridge Shakespeare Editions and has published articles and essays on early modern drama, on topics ranging from invisibility to ecology.