Lecture: How Easily Murder is Discovered

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | How easily murder is discovered: Lethal Lies, Truth-Telling, and False Evidence in Manipulating Wrongful Convictions in William Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus." This event is part of a series of lectures for Critical Conversations in Society, Culture, and Thought: Truth & Lies. 

Lecturer Lisa M. Barksdale-Shaw possesses dual doctoral degrees—her law degree from the University of Michigan Law School and her Ph.D. in English Literature and Language from Michigan State University. Her scholarly research mediates the fields of early modern English drama and the study of law and literature with interests in material culture, performance, race, medicine, ethics, and the history of law. In particular, she synthesizes both drama and litigation. Dr. Barksdale-Shaw considers the impact of legal spaces on literature and how they intervene within the culture. Recently, she has been working on a few book projects, including, Tainted Proofs: Staging Written Evidence in Early Modern Drama. She has contributed to journals and edited collections, including an upcoming collection entitled, Early Modern Ciphers edited by Katherine Ellison and Susan Kim as a part of the “Material Readings in Early Modern Culture” series by Routledge (2017). As a part of her second book project, Dr. Barksdale-Shaw’s work as an Erikson Scholar-in- Residence at the Austen Riggs Center complicates both war and racial trauma as she develops, using psychoanalysis and its testing strategies, an assessment and treatment of and theory for battle-tested Moors through the characters of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe on the stage, tentatively titled, The Warrior Gene: Racial Trauma and Identity in William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. Her talk is entitled, “‘How easily murder is discovered’: Lethal Lies, Truth-Telling, and False Evidence in Manipulating Wrongful Convictions in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.”