On Sept 18, students, faculty and members of the community gathered at Reece Museum for a lecture entitled “’The Othello Music’: Celebrating Paul Robeson’s Songs of Freedom” led by Dr. Robert Sawyer.
Dr. Sawyer’s Shakespearean discussion is the debut of a new lecture series sponsored by ETSU’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta. This series was formed with the international English honor society in order to promote universal literacy, excellence in writing and appreciation of literary arts.
As a professor of English at ETSU, Sawyer teaches Shakespeare, literary criticism and Victorian literature. Aside from his new release, “Shakespeare Between the World Wars,” Sawyer has published other works such as “Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare” and “Marlowe and Shakespeare: The Critical Rivalry.”
Sawyer began the lecture by discussing a chapter from his book describing African-American actor Paul Robeson, who was an acclaimed 20th-century performer and international activist. He starred in major roles, such as “The Emperor Jones” and “Othello” during chaotic years of the Interwar era.
“Probably the most important theme is the so-called cliché that ‘history repeats itself,'” Sawyer said when asked of the significance conveyed in the book. “As I note in this new book, the same fear mongering, trade wars, immigration and nationalism that led to World War II have once again come to the forefront in the era of Brexit and Trump.”
Sawyer’s new book is a fresh take on Shakespeare studies.
“The idea of focusing on the 20-year period “Between” the World Wars was one of the only eras that seemed not to be covered,” Sawyer said. “While there are plenty of books on Shakespeare and World War I, or Shakespeare and World War II, and even Shakespeare and the Cold War era, no book at the time focused on this ‘in-between’ time.”
