Fall 2026

SIGNATURE SEMINAR SERIES (12 WEEKS)

Maps, Masks, and Metamorphoses: The Shape of the Self in Transit 

Dr. Roche

This fall course explores Shakespeare’s sustained fascination with movement—across spaces, cities, roles, and names—and the transformations such movement produces. In Shakespeare, the self is rarely fixed; it is shaped by travel and exile, by disguise and performance, by departure, loss, and return. Framed by questions of borders and belonging, the course examines how identity is negotiated through maps and masks, through speech acts and social roles, through journeys both outward and inward. The body becomes a vessel, the city a stage, and the road an initiatory path where selves are tested, fractured, and remade. Moving beyond illusion and authority (the focus of the spring series), this course asks what happens after stability collapses: when political, linguistic, or moral maps no longer hold. Drawing on philosophy, performance, and cultural history, we consider how Shakespeare anticipates modern questions of mobility and identity: Who belongs where? What defines the self in motion? And what happens when the coordinates of meaning dissolve?

Expanded Philosophical Focus:
Not only identity and illusion, but the movement of the self, across spaces, cities, roles, and names. The body as a vessel, the city as a stage, the road as an initiatory path. Language, masks, and travel all become means of philosophical and theatrical transformation.

Additional Philosophical Anchors:

• Plato (Cratylus, Theaetetus) – naming, perception, travel of the soul
• Ovid (Metamorphoses) – transformation as journey
• Montaigne – Essais as inner travelogue; “Que sais-je?”
• Pico della Mirandola – the self as migratory potential
• Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo, Mandeville (as intertexts or supplements)
• Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities) — for a modern poetic frame
• Foucault — cities of surveillance, identity, masks

Plays:  Henry V, Pericles, and Cymbeline

📅 Dates: (12 weeks)

• September: 14, 21, 28
• October: 5, 12, 19, 26
• November: 2, 9, 16

(Recess: Thanksgiving week)

• November: 30
• December 7 (final session)

🕔 Schedule: Monday, 5:00 PM–6:30 PM

📍 Format: Hybrid (in-person & online)

💵 $250-$500 Sliding Scale

🏢Location:

Northampton Center for the Arts – Barn Door Gallery 

33 Hawley Street, Northampton, MA 01060

Website: nohoarts.org

Important Details:

• Please download the SLACK app to access reading materials and bringyour laptop.I am happy help set up SLACK during the first week of class.
• Extra readings will be posted on SLACK. Although not required, these materials will enhance our understanding of the context in which these plays were written.
• Windows download  Mac download  Linux download

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Guest Speaker
Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Transforming Stories and Reshaping Selves

Professor Lisa S. Starks

Lisa S. Starks is Professor of English at the University of South Florida and Associate Editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook. She specializes in Shakespeare, early modern drama, and adaptation studies. In these fields, her research examines intersections of Shakespeare with cinema, Jewish Shakespeares, Levinasian ethics, sexuality, violence, and trauma, as well as early modern theatre’s engagement with Ovid. Starks’s publications include Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre (Edinburgh UP, 2020), Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays (Palgrave, 2014), and two co-edited volumes on Shakespeare and film. She is currently completing a monograph, Levinas, Shakespeare, and Adaptation (Edinburgh UP), which explores how radical ethics can inform Shakespearean performance and pedagogy across media and cultures. 

📅 Date:  October 19th, 2026

🕔 Schedule: Monday, 5:00 PM–6:30 PM

📍 Format: Hybrid (in-person & online)

💵 Price: included in the semester registration. walk-ins: suggested donation $20

🏢Location: Northampton Center for the Arts – Barn Door Gallery
                  3 Hawley Street, Northampton, MA 01060
                  Website: nohoarts.org

 4 WEEK SEMINAR

Lost In Translation: Cymbeline

Dr. Marie Roche. PhD

This four-week seminar explores Cymbeline through the lens of translation, treating translation not as a technical exercise, but as a way of thinking about language, identity, and misrecognition. Few Shakespeare plays are more concerned with misnaming, disguise, false signs, and delayed recognition—making Cymbeline a rich testing ground for translation as both practice and philosophy.

Working with selected passages rather than the entire play, we will examine how meaning shifts across languages, contexts, and bodies. Translation will be approached lightly and collaboratively: participants do not need to know another language, though those who do are welcome to draw on it. Short excerpts in French (and occasionally other languages) will be introduced to illuminate how words carry—and fail to carry—truth.

Rather than aiming at mastery, the seminar asks what happens when words fail, when names deceive, and when meaning must be reconstructed across distance. Translation becomes a way to see Shakespeare thinking through the instability of language itself.

No prior knowledge of translation required, but a command of the French language: college level.

Play: Cymbeline
 

📅 Dates: (4 weeks)

• November: 4, 11, 18

(Recess: Thanksgiving week)

• December 2nd
  

🕔 Schedule: Wednesdays, 2:00 PM–3:30 PM

📍 Format: online via Zoom

💵 $100 Standalone  or  Free if enrolled in the fall seminar 

🏢Location: Zoom

Important Details:

• Please download the SLACK app to access reading materials and bringyour laptop.I am happy help set up SLACK during the first week of class.
• Extra readings will be posted on SLACK. Although not required, these materials will enhance our understanding of the context in which these plays were written.
• Windows download  Mac download  Linux download

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 Guest Speaker: TBA 

Co-taught with TBA

📅 Dates: TBA

🕔 Schedule: TBA

📍 Format: Zoom

💵 Price: included in the semester registration

🏢Location: Zoom

Registration