$250,000 MELLON GRANT SENDS ROWE BACK TO SCHOOL

Associate Professor of English Katherine Rowe, a Shakespeare scholar who has integrated studies of film and technology into her research and teaching, will pursue her interdisciplinary goals from a new position next year: as a graduate student in film studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

A $250,000 New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will support Rowe's cross-disciplinary scholarship by funding systematic training in a discipline outside the area of literary studies, in which she already has expertise. The New Directions program aims to "permit excellent scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences to work on problems that interest them most, but to do so at an appropriate level of sophistication" and to "benefit humanistic scholarship more generally by encouraging the highest standards in cross-disciplinary research."

"I think that the best interdisciplinary work has a foot firmly in both disciplines," Rowe says. "Next year, I'll be immersing myself in cinema studies — studying the discipline from the inside, rather than just sampling it, as I have been doing as a Shakespeare scholar. By studying the core curriculum, I hope to get a grip on the fundamental values and practices of the discipline: what kinds of evidence matters to the field, what are the questions that drive it?"

Rowe has published and taught screen adaptations of Shakespeare. A recent article on Michael Almereyda's 2000 Hamlet, for example, looks at the film's focus on modern technologies of memory, such as digital video. Memory arts, says Rowe, are a central concern of Shakespeare's play; technologies of memory, referenced in the text of the play, were in the process of transition when Hamlet was first performed, as they are today. Her analysis examines these transitions, exploring the way that "cultural practices based on older technologies, such as playtexts and writing, persist in and shape our uses of newer forms."

More recently, Rowe has written on sound — the use of music and voice in Scotland, Pa. (2001), a satirical adaptation of MacBeth. "Scholarship on sound has taken off in film studies in the past decade but scholarship on screen Shakespeare has yet to mine this new work," she says. "That is a significant gap in our field. When Shakespeare's playtexts are adapted to screen they 'happen' as much in the sound track as they do in the image track.

"I'm interested in the long history of technologies for storing and retrieving information," Rowe says, "and I expect to be able to take advantage of the Tisch program's offerings in media studies."

Rowe is currently completing a textbook with Thomas Cartelli of Muhlenberg College. New Wave Shakespeare explores adventurous adaptations of Shakespeare on screen since the 1990s. While taking courses at Tisch next yea, Rowe plans to expand on this work with a study of the place of Shakespeare in film history and film theory. "Shakespeare adaptations are among the earliest examples of narrative film," she says. "They've been around from the beginning, and I'm interested in the ways in which they shaped both the medium and the discourse that surrounds it."

The grant will cover salary for a full year and two summers, as well as tuition and travel expenses for her year at NYU (Rowe plans to commute from Bryn Mawr). It will also fund study in London, at the British Film Institute and at the British Library, which has an extensive archive of sound recordings of early performances of works by Shakespeare.

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