April 4: Final spring colloquium event examines Richard III
Friday, April 4, 2014
FREDERICK, Md.—The Hood College humanities colloquium will end its spring schedule with a two-part series on Richard III.
The 1995 film, Richard III, will be shown April 17 followed by a discussion on April 21. Both events will be at 7 p.m. in the College’s Whitaker Campus Center. Refreshments will be served.
English professors Mark Sandona and Heather Mitchell-Buck will give a talk, entitled “Richard III: Shakespeare’s Murderous Machiavel,” and lead a discussion on the depictions of Richard III in film and the king’s historical and political significance.
Sandona has taught at Hood since 1990. His area of interest is the relationship between literature and other forms of expression, especially visual art. He is the co-author of two books and three articles on the imagery in the Arena Chapel, a 14th century chapel in Padua, Italy.
Mitchell-Buck’s teaching specialties lie in medieval and early modern British literature. Her research focuses on the changing conceptions of kingship in the city of Chester, England, and its cycle of Biblical plays throughout the 16th century. She earned her doctoral degree at Duke University before coming to Hood in 2011.
The film, adapted from William Shakespeare’s play of the same name, follows the modern trend of interpreting Shakespeare through a nontraditional historical time period. Set nearly 500 years after the ruthless monarch’s two-year reign, the film is noted for employing an array of details, props and locations that were more characteristic of Europe in the 1930s than of the medieval era in which Richard lived.
The event, free and open to the public, is part the College’s annual Center for the Humanities colloquium series, which is funded in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant. Themed “The Worlds of Machiavelli,” this year’s events explore the social, cultural and political aspects of Florence during the Renaissance.
For more information about the colloquium series, contact Katy Fulfer, NEH/Libman professor of the humanities, at fulfer@hood.edu.