Dr. Robert Sawyer of East Tennessee State University’s Department of English has been named the recipient of a spring semester Lindsay Young Visiting Faculty Fellowship.The awards bring scholars from across Tennessee and the region to the University of Tennessee-Knoxville to use research resources that further their personal projects and contribute to the intellectual life of the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Sawyer has already begun his duties as a fellow and is at work on a proposed book project, “Shakespeare and Marlowe: Re-Writing the Rivalry.” The volume will show how the relationship of these two famous artists is portrayed in biographical and fictional forms, including critical works by T.S. Eliot, fictional works by Anthony Burgess, and films such as “Shakespeare in Love.”

Sawyer feels that the individual authors and the time in which they wrote determine the way the relationship between the two great authors is portrayed more than any “rivalry” between the two literary giants.

A portion of Sawyer’s research has already been published in the December issue of “Critical Survey,” and he was invited to present other findings at a University of Alabama symposium in January. A member of the executive committee of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Sawyer is on the editorial board for the South Atlantic Review and associate editor of “Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation.” He is the author of “Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare” and co-editor of “Shakespeare and Appropriation” and “Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare.” He recently published a book on Charles Kean, who produced the plays of Shakespeare in the mid-1800s, for the “Lives of Shakespearean Actors” series published by Pickering & Chatto (London).

For more information, contact Sawyer at 423-439-6670 or sawyerr@etsu.edu.

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