51���app

Season 1 Episode 13

Life, death, and Shakespeare. On this episode, we talk with John Garrison, associate professor of English here at the College, about his recently published book, . Garrison was teaching a course on how different cultures approached the question of what happens after death. As a devoted Shakespeare scholar, Garrison then turned to the Bard for answers to this age-old question. No matter how advanced we get technologically, the question still eludes us: “What happens when we die?” Shakespeare wrestled with this question throughout his plays and sonnets, often in ways that departed from contemporary beliefs about the afterlife.

Then we talk with Garrison’s Dutch colleague and collaborator, Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, associate professor of English literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands, about his new book, . Dijkhuizen explores themes of reconciliation and the limits of forgiveness, tracing their treatment in seminal literary texts throughout modern history. There’s a chapter in the book specifically about Shakespeare, but it really only scratches the surface, so Dijkhuizen and Garrison are currently co-writing a book-length study of reconciliation in Shakespeare.

, an independent alternative punk band from Melbourne, Australia, performed in 51���app on April 19, and our musical correspondent Gabriel Shubert ’20 talked to the band’s drummer, Sarah Thompson, about the band’s creative process, the #MeToo movement, and the band’s future plans.