Big Ideas, Busy People: Shakespeare's Genome?
The wildly popular “Big Ideas for Busy People” returns to the Wisconsin Science Festival for a third-consecutive year. Five leading thinkers will feature their groundbreaking work at this unique event that began at the Cambridge (MA) Science Festival. Each presenter has five minutes to share their idea and five minutes to answer questions (time will be kept with a gong).
Featured talk: Shakespeare’s Genome?
Josh Calhoun discusses new, intriguing, bookish collaborations that are bringing humanists and scientists together in an unlikely space: rare books archives. Studying Medieval and Renaissance books all the way down to the microbial level is changing what we know about the habits and habitats of historical book readers. Come find out how close reading and proteomic sequencing can tell us more about Shakespeare’s biome—and maybe even his genome.
Joshua Calhoun
Joshua Calhoun is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in Shakespeare, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, and the history of media. As a Faculty Affiliate at theNelson Institute for Environmental Studies, he also teaches courses in the environmental humanities. He is currently writing a book about poetry, papermaking, and ecology titled The Nature of the Page: Ecology, Poetry, and Papermaking in Renaissance England. Calhoun is the co-founder of Holding History, a mentorship-driven public engagement project that trains an interdisciplinary group of students to share their knowledge and the resources of the campus with the broader community.