ACMRS (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies)

08/20/2026

Andrew Siañez-De La O’s Rough Magic asks what happens when Shakespeare’s The Tempest unfolds not on Prospero’s island, but in a Latinx community weathering Hurricane Harvey in Houston.

The result is more than an adaptation. Siañez-De La O calls the play a “rumination” on The Tempest. His play deconstructs Shakespeare and collages it with Mexican American and Afro-Latinx cultures, Selena, q***r kinship, environmental injustice, and spiritual practices.

This play and appropriations of Shakespeare en la Frontera can be found in The Bard in the Borderlands, Vol. 3. Read it for free online from ACMRS Press.
https://asu.pressbooks.pub/bard-in-the-borderlands-volume-3/

08/15/2026

Chaucer's resourceful and unsettled Middle English is a place of inspiration for artists globally. On Throughlines, Jonathan Hsy teaches global Chaucer adaptations as sites of linguistic belonging.

08/13/2026

In 1685, a slave ship called the Dorothy exploded off the coast of Ghana, killing 135 enslaved Africans. The court records blame one woman who "carelessly" dropped her pipe into the gunpowder. But what if it wasn't an act of carelessness? Watch Jennifer L. Morgan talk about reading the archive against the grain, from her book Reckoning with Slavery. Learn more from Professor Morgan for free at throughlines.org.

08/12/2026

Whether your syllabus is ready to go or you're still tweaking it, Throughlines has a vast trove of teaching resources guaranteed to enrich your class discussions. This month, we're sharing new contributions from Jonathan Hsy, on teaching Chaucer through adaptations, and Jennifer L. Morgan, on reading the resistance of enslaved women in the historical archive.

Jonathan Hsy offers his approach to expanding Chaucer across time and contexts in his video "Teaching the Wife of Bath's Tale through adaptation ." Hsy explores how contemporary adaptations of Chaucer can open new conversations about gender, power, justice, performance, and cultural context. By examining adaptations by artists including Joanna Quinn, Patience Agbabi, and Jean “Binta” Breeze, Hsy shows how encountering The Wife of Bath's Tale across different media, places, and moments can challenge what students think they know about a familiar medieval text.

In "Reading resistance in the archive," Jennifer L. Morgan reads the archive of Atlantic slavery against the grain to recover what its authors worked to bury: the everyday resistance of enslaved women. For teachers of early modern literature, history, gender studies, and Black studies, Morgan's approach opens direct conversations about power, evidence, reproductive labor, and the resistance that shaped the Black Atlantic. It's a starting point for a question that matters in every classroom: whose stories does the record preserve and whose must we work to hear?

07/10/2026

Save the date! Early Modern Race and Disability: Intersections and Beyond September 2, 2026
In recent years, the study of early modern literature and culture has become increasingly informed by the insights of critical race studies; in a parallel development, scholars are also showing a growing commitment to exploring disability in the early modern world. This conversation puts premodern critical race studies and early modern disability studies in conversation — to explore not only the specific intersections between race and disability, but also to theorize how the two fields’ shared commitment to interrogating forms of early modern difference might be mutually-informing more broadly.
Register for this webinar today! https://na.eventscloud.com/race-and-disability

07/02/2026

The narrator of Samuel Rowlands’s “A Courtesan’s Humor” (1607) is a woman who manages a brothel. The poem is structured as a first-person account of her profession, and unlike the cony-catching pamphlets of the period, which typically expose the tricks of s*x workers from the outside, this poem adopts the courtesan’s own perspective. Whether or not Rowlands intended it, the poem offers a portrayal of s*x work as labor governed by market forces, professional risk, and the pragmatics of survival. Read more Early Modern works of women's voices penned by male authors in the new anthology HE WORDS ME, edited by Catherine Loomis—free from ACMRS Press open access: https://asu.pressbooks.pub/he-words-me/chapter/382/

07/01/2026

Four of the boldest reinventions of Shakespeare on the US–Mexico border — a narco Macbeth, a post-apocalyptic Henry IV, a q***r Hamlet on the turntables, and a Tempest in a hurricane — now free for everyone to read in the third volume of The Bard in the Borderlands. Dig in now: https://ow.ly/vKTC50ZjlWQ

06/25/2026

To understand our libraries and editorial traditions today, Emma Smith argues we must confront how deeply these systems of value were shaped by the economics and injustices of the transatlantic slave trade. https://throughlines.org/suite-content/slavery-sugar-and-the-value-of-shakespeare

06/24/2026

How lucky are we to call Ty Defoe a colleague and friend? From his interview with KJZZ on his multimedia, one-person puppet show SKELETON CANOE: "I feel like ancient teachings of culture, there’s a lot to be learned, and I think love is for everybody. I think care is for everybody, respect is for everybody. And I think pieces like this when brought into the community really teach everybody about hope, love and understanding."

An interdisciplinary artist with ties to Arizona State University will be performing this weekend at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, Connecticut.

04/23/2026

Happy birthday Shakespeare! Who wants a triple-serving of Titus to celebrate? Ayanna Thompson has three new pieces on Throughlines unpacking the deep questions that arise when you wipe away all the blood in Shakespeare's goriest tragedy.
https://www.throughlines.org/suite-content/indecourm-and-empire-in-titus-andronicus