Re-Reading, Re-Writing, Re-Contextualizing Shakespeare is one of the many international conferences that celebrates Shakespeare’s 400-year afterlife. However, we would also like to regard it as a unique academic event, and the city of Iaşi, together with its old university, as privileged places to host it. The reasons for this could be manifold, but two of them stand out as particularly relevant in this respect: firstly, it was in Iaşi that the first Romanian translation of a Shakespearean play, The Merchant of Venice, was staged in 1851; secondly, it was at the University of Iaşi that, more than a century and a half later, in 2007, the European Shakespeare Research Association (ESRA) was founded.
The title of this conference refers to the very diverse ways in which Shakespeare’s works and reputation have travelled cross-culturally, being transposed into different cultures, geographical locations and historical moments; it encourages further research on how the Bard has been appropriated throughout the centuries so as to strengthen different cultural and political agendas; it invites participants to continue investigations of all those mechanisms which have ultimately made Shakespeare a unique cultural phenomenon as well as an “institution”.
UPDATE 23.10.2016
