Stuart John Sillars

Stilling: professor

Telefon: 55 58 82 89

E-post: Stuart.Sillars@if.uib.no

Besøksadresse: HF-bygget, Sydnesplassen 7

Stuart Sillars has been Professor of English Literature at Bergen since 1999, having previously been a member of the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. His research has focussed on the relations between literature and the visual arts, on which he has written and lectured extensively. His earlier publications were on literature and art during the two world wars, and illustration in the novel, but he has also written on the contention between modernism and tradition in the early twentieth century. He now works largely in the area of Shakespeare and the visual arts, in  particular the exchange of concept and technique between theatre, illustration and painting, as well as Shakespeare and the idea of character in the early modern theatre. Since January 2011 he has been professor II at the University of Agder.

His teaching in Bergen involves all areas, from first year survey courses to doctoral supervision, and he also travels extensively to lecture and teach throughout Europe and the USA.

Professor Sillars is joint general editor of Early Modern Culture Online, associate editor of Cahiers elisabethains, and editorial board member of  The Nordic Journal of English Studies; American, British and Canadian Studies (Romania); Oasis (New Delhi); and Countertext (Malta). He is  on the editorial board of The Greenwood Shakespeare Encyclopedia, for which he is also illustrations editor.

He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Arts and Sciences; a Visiting Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge; an Honoraray Research Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London.

 

 

 

 

 

BA (Combined Honours) English and Music, University of Exeter

MA University of Wales, Aberystwyh

PhD University of Amsterdam

Publikasjoner i Cristin

Books

Shakespeare, Time and the Victorians: A Pictorial Exploration Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011

The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709-1875 Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008

Fields of Agony: British Poetry of the First World War Penrith, Cumbria: Humanities Ebooks, 2007

also available as a Kindle

Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720-1820 Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006 

Structure and Dissolution in English Writing, 1910-1920 London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin's Press, 1999

Visualisation in English Fiction, 1840-1940 London and New York: Routledge, 1995

also available as an e-book

British Romantic Art and the Second World War London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin's Press, 1992

Art and Survival in First World War Britain  London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin's Press, 1987

Articles and reviews in Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Quarterly, Archiv, Interfaces, English Studies and numerous other journals

For a full list of articles and contributions to collections, see FRIDA via the link above

Teaching ranges across periods and levels, from the 100-level survey course to doctoral supervision.

Courses at 200 level have included work on Shakespeare and Modernism, and at 300 level the early Twentieth-century English novel, Shakespeare and the visual sense, Shakespeare and the Victorians, metaphysical poetry, and the long eighteenth century.

MA theses supervised have included topics from a wide diversity of genres and periods, from Chaucer through seventeenth-century poetry and Shakespeare to recent and contemporary film adaptations. I am always happy to discuss ideas for Master's theses that discuss aspects of English writing from all periods, with a particular interest in those that combine literature with the visual arts or music.

Doctoral thesis supervision has covered the poetry of Paul Muldoon, the teaching of English poetry in Norwegian schools, African tragedic theatre and the poetry of Ezra Pound, and aspects of Shakespeare's plays in visual form.

 

Professor Sillars is the founder and director of the Bergen Shakespeare and Drama Network, a group of international scholars that meets regularly to exchange research and develop new projects and activities in which research students are fully involved as equal members. For more information, see http://www.uib.no/rg/bsdn

Since 2007 he has been the Norwegian co-ordinator of a five-year research project funded by NUFU, in collaboration with Makerere University, Uganda, on Ugandan oral forms as a repository of traditional wisdom.  The project has produced two volumes of essays, with a third in preparation.

He was also the co-curator, with Dr Erin Blake, of 'The Extra-Illustrated Shakespeare' exhibition, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 24 January - 25 May 2010.

Current writing 

Shakespeare and the Victorians (Shakespeare Topics series) Oxford University Press.

Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination  Cambridge University Press

Multiple contributions to The Greenwood Shakespeare Encyclopedia, forthcoming 2012

Macro entry on Shakespeare and visual art and micro entry on Photography for The Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013

Commissioned articles on Shakespeare, Apuleius and the Hypnerotomachia; English Romantic landscape and John Locke; Shakespeare's devotional rhythms; architectural space in Shakespeare illustration.

Chapter on Shakespeare painting and illustration for Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century, forthcoming late 2011, Cambridge University Press

Article on Nineteenth-century Illustrations of A Midsummer Night's Dream commissioned for Shakespeare Survey 63, Cambridge University Press (2012)

Compiling and editing a new volume in the revised edition of Geoffrey Bullough's Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare on Shakespeare's visual sources, for publication by Routledge in 2015,

 

Forthcoming international engagements, 2012

24-6 February Plenary lecture, British Shakespeare Association conference, University of Lancaster

5-7 April   Panel member, Shakespeare Association of America, Boston

*26 April - 2 May Symposium on oral tradition, makerere University, Uganda

*19-22 October BSDN conference, Tarquinia, Italy

23-6 October Erasmus exchange lectures, Università di Venezia - Ca' Foscari

16-18 November 'L'image brisée' symposium, Université Paul Valéry III, Montpellier.

22-8 November Plenary lecture, literature and Emotion conference, University of Western Australia.

* Provisional dates