The ANU Centre for Early Modern Studies is pleased to welcome Professor of English Gretchen Minton of Montana State University for our inaugural seminar of 2023.

“Shakespeare and the Settlement of the North American West” focuses upon the role that Shakespeare as a cultural icon played in the nineteenth-century settlement of the North American frontier, providing a thorough picture of how the earliest white men who migrated across the continent used, understood and interacted with Shakespeare’s works. Re-examining narratives about white settler encounters with Shakespeare reveals several recurring themes, including the importance of books, hybrid identities, a return to Europe and the fashioning of Western personae. In the narratives about such encounters the voices of the Indigenous people are consistently silenced, but important perspectives arise when we analyse the nature of such marginalization. The paper thus ultimately demonstrates that attitudes toward Shakespeare are symptomatic of attitudes toward settlement in the Rocky Mountain region, and thus invariably symptomatic of how Australia’s Indigenous peoples were treated.