Kent State University’s Graduate Program in Literature and the Kent Free Library are pleased to announce a co-sponsored series of lectures on outstanding authors.

Professor Don-John Dugas, an expert on William Shakespeare and early modern drama, will deliver the premiere lecture in the series 7 p.m., Thursday, April 26th, in the Kent Free Library’s spacious new lecture hall. The event is free and open to the public. 

Dugas’s April lecture, "Did Shakespeare’s ‘War of the Theatres’ Happen?" considers the rivalry between the professional adult theatrical companies and the private children’s theatrical companies made famous in Hamlet. Taking little-used commercial evidence as his starting-point, Dugas considers whether this "war" might actually have been a sophisticated advertising scheme that has escaped detection for more than 400 years.

Dugas joined the Kent State University English Department following a national search for a Shakespearean in 2005. His first book, Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print 1660–1740, was published by the University of Missouri Press in October 2006.  His research has appeared in scholarly journals including Harvard Library Bulletin, the interdisciplinary journal Mosaic, and the University of Chicago’s prestigious Modern Philology. 

The Kent Free Library lecture series showcases the exceptional talents and scholarship of faculty directing graduate research in the doctoral literature program at Kent State University. Upcoming lectures—one per semester—will focus on some of our language’s most popular and enduring authors, including such dynamic figures as Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce, to name a few. 

Please contact English professor Claire Culleton, 330-672-1709, for more information.