History
Sapienza University of Rome - Shakespeare Seminar Series
Sapienza University of Rome - Shakespeare Seminar Series was inaugurated in 2014 within the framework of academic events aimed at celebrating the quadricentennial anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Organized jointly by the three public universities in Rome – Sapienza University, Università degli Studi Roma Tor Vergata and Università di Roma Tre – the celebrations culminated in the international conference Shakespeare 2016 - Memoria di Roma (2016).
Four events were specifically organised at Sapienza within the Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies, thereby paving the way for the 2016 conference:
- 16th April 2014: Thinking with Shakespeare (in pair with the presentation of the first issue of Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal of Shakespearean Studies in digital form, edited by Rosy Colombo and Nadia Fusini);
- 19th December 2014: Da Beckett a Shakespeare: La tempesta di Valerio Binasco (From Beckett to Shakespeare: The Tempest by Valerio Binasco), organized by Rosy Colombo and Andrea Peghinelli;
- 14th May 2015: Amleto con Freud e Lacan (Hamlet with Freud and Lacan), organized by Rosy Colombo;
- 10th December 2015: Dealing with Shakespeare's Heritage: Edward Bond's Anatomy of the Human, organized by Rosy Colombo and Andrea Peghinelli.
Thanks to the involvement and devotion of Rosy Colombo and Andrea Peghinelli, each seminar was preceded by workshop sessions (Laboratorio Shakespeariano) with the aim of providing students – their participants – with the necessary knowledge and tools, and of ensuring active participation.
In the years following the 2016 international conference, the Seminar Series continued taking place at Sapienza, where other four events were held:
- 13rd December 2016: Shakespeare e le prigioni (Shakespeare and prisons), a round table coordinated by Giuseppe Massara with the participation of Fabio Cavalli, Robert Pensalfini, Maria Cristina Cavecchi, Andrea Peghinelli;
- 22nd May 2017: La stoffa dei sogni. La Tempesta tra Shakespeare e Eduardo (The fabric of dreams. The Tempest between Shakespeare and Eduardo), organized by Andrea Peghinelli;
- 9th March 2018: Shakespeare's English Goes Digital: Texts, Tools, Methods, edited by Donatella Montini;
- 7th May 2018: Peter Stein e il teatro di Shakespeare (Peter Stein and Shakespeare's Theatre), organized by Giuseppe Massara and Andrea Peghinelli.
- 20th-21st February 2020: Voice and Voices in Shakespeare's World, organized by Donatella Montini, Iolanda Plescia, Andrea Peghinelli and Irene Ranzato.
These events were sponsored by the Faculty of Humanities, the Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies and Fondazione Sapienza. They also secured support from the AIA, Italian association of English studies and the Italian Association of Shakespearean and Early Modern Studies (IASEMS), and attracted a large turnout both on the part of students and teachers.
At the beginning of 2019, the Academic Senate resolved to renew the agreement between Sapienza University of Rome and Fondazione Roma Sapienza (Decree no. 277/2019 of 24/01/2019) and appointed Prof. Donatella Montini (Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies) and Prof. Beatrice Alfonzetti (Department of Letters and Modern Cultures) as supervisors of the Seminar Series for their departments.