Curran Kevin

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email : Kevin.Curran@unil.ch
Personal page : https://www.kevindcurran.com

Faculté des lettres

Centre d'études théâtrales
Position(s): Professeur associé

Section d'anglais
Position(s): Professeur associé

Section d'anglais
Quartier UNIL-Chamberonne
Bâtiment Anthropole 5123
CH - 1015 Lausanne
Phone: 021 692 29 95

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Kevin Curran specializes in English Renaissance drama with a particular focus on Shakespeare. He is the editor of the book series “Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy” and author of Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies: Law and Distributed Selfhood (2017) and Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court (2009). He is the editor of Renaissance Personhood (2019), Shakespeare and Judgment (2016), and co-editor of a special issue of the journal Criticism on “Shakespeare and Phenomenology” (2012). In 2017, Prof. Curran was named Distinguished International Visiting Fellow at the Center for the History Of Emotions in Australia. He is the founder and President of the Lausanne Shakespeare Festival.

Publications

2017

Kevin Curran, Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies: Law and Distributed Selfhood. Northwestern University Press, 2017.

Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies offers the first sustained examination of the relationship between law and selfhood in Shakespeare’s work. Taking five plays and the sonnets as case studies, Kevin Curran argues that law provided Shakespeare with the conceptual resources to imagine selfhood in social and distributed terms, as a product of interpersonal exchange or as a gathering of various material forces. In the course of these discussions, Curran reveals Shakespeare’s distinctly communitarian vision of personal and political experience, the way he regarded living, thinking, and acting in the world as materially and socially embedded practices.

At the center of the book is Shakespeare’s fascination with questions that are fundamental to both law and philosophy: What are the sources of agency? What counts as a person? For whom am I responsible, and how far does that responsibility extend? What is truly mine? Curran guides readers through Shakespeare’s responses to these questions, paying careful attention to both historical and intellectual contexts.

The result is a book that advances a new theory of Shakespeare’s imaginative relationship to law and an original account of law’s role in the ethical work of his plays and sonnets. Readers interested in Shakespeare, theater and philosophy, law, and the history of ideas will find Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies to be an essential resource.

ISBN: 9780810135185

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