Monday, October 22, 2018, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT
Sheila Cavanagh, Professor of English, Director, World Shakespeare Project
“Crowd-sourcing ‘Return to The Wasteland’: Margate and Coventry in 2018”
In recent years, discussions surrounding concepts of public scholarship have been gaining prominence in academic circles and beyond. Such examinations recently interacted with Eliot scholarship at the Turner Gallery in Margate. In 2018, Professor Mike Tooby oversaw a “crowd-sourced” exhibition related to Eliot’s composition of The Wasteland in this English coastal town in 1922. It closed in May 2018, but a new version will be mounted in Coventry in September. In this talk, Sheila will address the process and its outcome within the context of theories associated with public scholarship, considering the advantages and pitfalls of encouraging non-specialists in this kind of endeavor, which is most commonly restricted to experts.