Wooden O Symposium

Scholars from across the United States and beyond will be gathering online August 3–4 for the nineteenth annual Wooden O Symposium sponsored by the Utah Shakespeare Festival and Southern Utah University. The topic of this year’s symposium will be, appropriately, Shakespeare: Story and Adaptation. Now in its nineteenth year, the Wooden O Symposium is a cross-disciplinary conference exploring Medieval through Early Modern Studies through the text and performance of Shakespeare’s plays.

The conference will feature a keynote speaker, an actors panel, and over thirty academics from around the world presenting papers, including those by scholars from Canada, Britain, Australia, and Ukraine.

Popular speaker and writer Ian Doescher will be the keynote speaker. Doescher is the author of the William Shakespeare’s Star Wars series, Much Ado about Mean Girls, The Taming of the Clueless, Get Thee Back to the Future, Deadpool Does Shakespeare, and MacTrump and is the creator of the Shakespeare 2020 Project. He has a B.A. in music from Yale University, a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School, and a Ph.D. in ethics from Union Theological Seminary.

The actors panel will feature Festival actors Betsy Mugavero, Quinn Mattfeld, and René Thornton Jr.

After the symposium, selected articles will be published in The Journal of the Wooden O. The journal is published annually by Southern Utah University Press in cooperation with the SUU Center for Shakespeare Studies and the Festival.