News & Events Renaissance Scholar Heidi Brayman Hackel To Speak at Amherst College April 17

March 28, 2007
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Renaissance scholar Heidi Brayman Hackel of Oregon State University will speak on “Dumb Eloquence: Chirology on the Shakespearean Stage” at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, April 17, in the Babbott Room in the Octagon at Amherst College. Sponsored by the English Department at Amherst College and the Georges Lurcy Lecture Series Fund, the event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will follow.

Hackel’s talk will explore deafness, muteness and chirology—the language of the hand—in Shakespeare, bringing the story up to American Sign Language and the International Visual Theater, a French company including deaf actors.

An associate professor of English at Oregon State University, Hackel is the author of Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (2005) and co-editor of The Transatlantic Worlds of Women’s Reading, 1500-1800 (forthcoming). Her lecture is part of a book in progress titled Dumb Shows, Plain Signs: A Cultural History of Muteness and Gesture in Early Modern England.

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