Rethinking Othello: Race, Gender, and Teaching a TragedyMaster ClassIn-Person
Wednesday, Apr 29, 2026
9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m
Location To Be Announced
Written at the height of Shakespeare’s powers as playwright and poet, Othello has long been celebrated as one of the greatest tragedies. Its prescient exploration of questions of race and sexuality has made it seem almost eerily contemporary. But this contemporaneity also poses significant problems for productions—and for teachers. What is the relation between our current notions of race and those from more than four hundred years ago? How should we understand the motives that lead to the femicide and suicide with which the play ends? In this class, we will acquaint ourselves with aspects of the play’s storied stage history, including the African American Ira Aldridge’s pioneering performance of the title role. We will look at some of the materials that Shakespeare used in creating his tragedy—Geraldi Cinthio’s short story and the account of Africa by Al-Hasan Al-Wazzan—and we will read several recent responses to Othello, including Toni Morrison’s probing play Desdemona.
ELA, CLASSICS, THEATER
Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of fifteen books, including Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics; The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve; The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (winner of the 2011 National Book Award and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize) and Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Shakespeare, has edited seven collections of criticism, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. He was named the 2016 Holberg Prize Laureate. His honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Philosophical Society, the Italian literary academy Accademia degli Arcadi, and is a fellow of the British Academy.