2026
Symposium: Environmental and Racial Justice in Shakespeare Studies
The Columbia Shakespeare Seminar at Columbia University
April 24, 2026
Organizers: Steve Mentz, St. John's University, Debapriya Sarkar, University of Connecticut, and Hillary Eklund, Grinnell College
2025
Panel: Inclusive Pedagogy Initiative "Teaching Race and Place with Spenser"
The International Spenser Society
December 9, 2025
Organizers: Dennis Britton, University of British Columbia and Hillary Eklund, Grinnell College
As Spenser writes characters in and out of diverse locales, he meditates on matters of embodiment, questions of identity, the play of social and ‘natural’ hierarchies, and the effects of geography on individual and collective bodies. How might we engage students in discussing these topics? And what possibilities might such conversations hold for collaborative knowledge creation, place-based learning and action?
This IPI panel featured Zainab Cheema (Florida Gulf Coast University), Eli Cumings (Columbia University), Claire Eager (The College of Wooster), and Justin Shaw (Clark University), who discussed approaches to content, contexts, and methods for teaching race and place with Spenser.
Workshop: The Sea Voyage by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger
The Private Theatre's Early Modern Collab
October 4 and October 5, 2025 at the Manhattan Theatre Club
Actors: Annabel Capper and John Douglas Thompson
Organizers: Hillary Eklund, Grinnell College, Musa Gurnis, Private Theatre, and Debapriya Sarkar, University of Connecticut
Led by Annabel Capper and John Douglas Thompson, this masterclass provided scholars, students, and members of the public with a unique opportunity to observe professional actors as they explored scenes from The Sea Voyage. The workshop emphasized world building and group dynamics within this underperformed response to Shakespeare’s Tempest.
Participants were invited to reflect on how the play’s wet spaces—including shores, lakes, rivers, and fens—act as a proving ground for different visions of mastery in a world increasingly defined by its watery expanses. The workshop prompted questions about effectively representing the dynamic qualities of waterways—such as shores, seas, wetlands, and rivers—on stage. It also encouraged consideration of how theatrical staging can illuminate water’s role in mediating relationships between humans and more-than-human environments, resources, and objects, as well as its influence on relations of gender, nationality, and race.
Seminar: Race and Place in Shakespeare and Spenser
Shakespeare Association of America
Dennis A. Britton, University of British Columbia
Hillary Eklund, Grinnell College
How might placing Spenser and Shakespeare in conversation extend ongoing conversations in premodern critical race studies, ecocriticism, and social justice? This seminar invites papers that examine how Spenser and/or Shakespeare figure racial and natural hierarchies, and how they use place to sort people based on superficial markings and other real or imagined characteristics. Can putting these poets in dialogue create new avenues for situated knowledge, mutual care, and ethical habitation?
Workshop: Environmental Justice Pedagogy
Humanities Institute, University of Connecticut
Co-conveners: Carol Mejia-LaPerle, Wright State University and Davy Knittle, University of Delaware
Participants: Dennis Britton, Hillary Eklund, Kathryn Vomero Santos, Kirsten Mendoza, Nathaniel Otjen, Debapriya Sarkar
The workshop gathered scholar-teachers—both early modernists and scholars working on contemporary environmental humanities—with the aim of developing a teaching module that uses early modern texts to frame approaches to environmental justice. This module would be suitable for a variety of classroom contexts, from writing to Shakespeare to literature & environment. The participants will teach it during AY25-26 then reconvene in a virtual seminar to discuss their experiences. In addition to producing a flexible and portable teaching unit, we hope the collaborative approach to teaching across institutions can serve as a model.
2024
Workshop: Race, Place, and the Nonhuman in Early Modernity
Folger Shakespeare Library
Hillary Eklund, Loyola University New Orleans
Debapriya Sarkar, University of Connecticut
This workshop gathered together scholars, teachers, artists, and activists to explore and interrupt the legacies of early modern racial and environmental injustice. Through sessions on community engagement, public humanities, scholarship, and the arts, participants discussed different strategies for bringing the environmental humanities into conversation with work on race and empire.
2022
Seminar: Early Modern Ecocriticism and Critical Race Studies
Shakespeare Association of America
Hillary Eklund, Loyola University New Orleans
Jennifer Park, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Debapriya Sarkar, University of Connecticut
Ayanna Thompson, Arizona State University
This seminar convened scholars working at the intersection of early modern ecocriticism and premodern critical race studies to address the following questions: How might studies of early modern literature attend to our presentist concerns? How can research on environmental catastrophes, refugia, or natural resources expand studies of colonization and empire? How might studies of race and gender foster an intersectional ecofeminism? How might we better explore the entanglements of racial, social, and environmental injustice?
2021
Shakespeare Futures Panel: Critical Futures of Early Modern Eco-Studies and Race Studies
Becoming Undisciplined: A Venture in Collaborative Criticism
Debapriya Sarkar, University of Connecticut
Jennifer Park, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Hillary Eklund, Loyola University New Orleans
Ayanna Thompson, Arizona State University
For this panel, the four of us co-wrote and co-presented a single paper. Our project aimed to put premodern critical race studies (PCRS) and environmental humanities into a more direct dialogue. Our early conversations, however, revealed how our individual critical perspectives limited our approaches. As we shared and discussed readings, we were inspired to challenge traditional protocols and products of scholarly labor and the persistently individualized patterns of inquiry in the humanities.
We later published this work as the article, “Becoming Undisciplined: On Pathways to Racial and Environmental Justice in Early Modern Literary Studies” (PMLA 2024), which demonstrates how putting questions of environmental and racial justice into more direct conversation in early modern studies both requires and yields new approaches to our disciplinary assumptions, research practices, and even our own scholarly voices.
