2001 - Shakespeare in European Culture (Basel)

From 14 to 17 November, 2001, Basel hosted the conference “Shakespeare in European Culture”. It was organized by the “Shakespeare in Europe—Sh:in:E” research group at the University of Basel, which had been founded in 1997 and continues to run the Sh:in:E website (http://pages.unibas.ch/shine/). In 1999 it joined the European network at the Murcia conference (see elsewhere on this website).

The Basel conference brought together 64 scholars from Albania, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and the United States, among them Peter Holland, Clara Calvo, Michael Dobson, Alexander Shurbanov, Werner Habicht, Michèle Willems, Manfred Pfister, Péter Dávidházi, Alessandro Serpieri, Ruth Frfr. von Ledebuhr, and Isabelle Schwarz-Gastine. It was one of the aims of the conference to facilitate between them and younger colleagues. There were ten plenaries; 36 papers were offered in five seminars on Performance, Criticism, Translation, Education und Iconicity (the last two topics were new to such a conference).

Four of the plenaries were open to the public: Peter Holland, "Staging Europe in Shakespeare", Alexander Shurbanov, "The Shakespearean Sound in Translation", Manfred Pfister, " 'In states unborn and accents yet unknown': Shakespeare and the European Canon", Ruth Frfr. Von Ledebur, "National Identity and the Teaching of Shakespeare".

A selection of the papers has since been published:
Shifting the Scene: Shakespeare in European Culture, ed. by Ladina Bezzola Lambert and Balz Engler. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2004. (for details consult Google Book Search http://books.google.com/).

Balz Engler