"What Country, Friends, is This?" | An Evening with James Sutton & Guests

Join us with James Sutton and special guests, Vanessa Corredera, Madeline Cisneros, and Stephanie Chamberlain, for the release of Sutton's newest book, "What Country, Friends, is This?"

🎟 This event is FREE and open to the public and books will be available for purchase the night of the event! An RSVP grants general entry, but seating is not guaranteed, so please try and show up early. Please RSVP only if you intend to join us. Can't make the event?

An exploration of displacement and exile in Shakespeare’s plays and our world today.
This compelling collection of fourteen essays explores the enduring theme of exile in Shakespeare’s works and their global afterlives, offering a timely and thought-provoking response to the modern age of displacement. Building on Edward Said’s observation that exile today is marked by its unprecedented scale—driven by war, imperialism, totalitarianism, climate change, and systemic injustice—this volume traces the ideological and cultural forces that shape experiences of exile across time and geography.
Shakespeare’s plays, deeply haunted by exile in its many guises—political, religious, cultural, and gendered—serve as a rich site for interrogating identity, belonging, and otherness.

James M. Sutton, Associate Professor of English at Florida International University, and current Director of the Exile Studies Certificate Program at FIU.

Vanessa I. Corredera is a Professor of English at Baylor University. Her scholarship examines race, gender and sexuality in Shakespearean performance, adaptations/appropriations, and pop culture. She is the author of Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello in Post-Racial America (2022) and co-editor of the collection Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation (2023). Her scholarship has appeared in a range of journals, including Shakespeare Quarterly, Borrowers and Lenders, and Shakespeare Bulletin, as well as edited collections like Shakespeare/Play and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race. She is a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America and a General Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly. Her current research examines the re-scripting of race in stage adaptations of Shakespeare created by artists of color.

Madeline Cisneros is a Doctoral candidate at the University of Miami completing her third year of the PhD in English. Her dissertation focuses on tracking William Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I’s relationship through the playwright’s dramatic presentation of monarchy, female bodies of power, and sovereignty. Madeline was born and raised in Miami and is the grandchild of four Cuban-American exiles, which informs the foundation of much of her research.

Stephanie E. Chamberlain, Professor Emerita of English at Southeast Missouri State University. She has published in Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World, edited by Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea (2019). Her reviews and book chapters have appeared in journals such as Renaissance Quarterly, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Upstart Crow, and the Ben Jonson Journal; in edited collections, New Directions in Much Ado About Nothing (2023), and Domestic Arrangements in Early Modern England (2002). She is co-editor of All’s Well That Ends Well and Its Afterlives, forthcoming from Palgrave. She convened a panel on Shakespeare, Immigration and Exile in Rome (2019). She co-led the SAA 2022 seminar on Shakespeare and Exile in Jacksonville, Florida. She is co-editor of and contributor to “What Country, Friends, is This”: Shakespeare and the Staging of Exile (ACMRS, 2026).

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