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Laurie Osborne

Title

Professor of English and Zacamy Chair in English, Emerita

Department

English

Information

Address

5278 Mayflower Hill Waterville, Maine 04901-8853

Areas of Expertise

  • YA literature and Shakespeare

  • Shakespeare on film

  • Renaissance drama

  • Adaptation studies

  • Shakespeare in popular culture

  • Literary theory and film theory

Personal Information

Laurie Osborne teaches Shakespeare, film theory, literary theory, adaptation studies, and, with particular glee and wild abandon, composition. After completing her book, The Trick of Singularity: Twelfth Night and Performance Editions, Osborne vowed never to publish again. Or at least not on Twelfth Night. She has been unable to keep that promise and has one essay on amity in Twelfth Night, another on three teen films that adapt the comedy, and yet a third in her new project on Mary Cowden Clarke and Shakespeare.

Her most recent scholarship could be loosely labeled “Shakespeare and Popular Culture.” Romance novels, young adult fiction, and, yes, a LOT of Shakespeare on film are all victims of her pen. She has developed a website devoted to one of these unlikely topics entitled “Romancing the Bard,” and she actually has a Facebook page, though she rarely visits it.

Her favorite color is purple, her favorite song is Brahms’ 2nd piano concerto, her favorite junk book is Georgette Heyer’s The Grand Sophy, and her most treasured achievement is the first Colby Senior Teaching Award given to a female professor.

Current Research

Reinventing the Girlhoods of Shakespeare Heroines, book manuscript in progress

“The Paranormal Bard: Shakespeare Is/As Undead” –submitted to Shakespeare and the Modern Novel, Cambridge

Work on Global Shakespeares and adaptation

Publications

“Serial Shakespeare: Intermedial Performance and the Outrageous Fortunes of Slings & Arrows,” Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Fall 2011).

“iShakespeare: Digital Art/Games, Intermediality, and the Future of Shakespearean Film,” Shakespeare Studies 38 (Fall 2010): 48-57.

“The Marriage of True Minds: Twinning, Amity and Comic Closure in Twelfth Night,” Twelfth Night: New Critical Essays, Editor James Schiffer. NY: Routledge, 2010.

“A Local Habitation and a Name: Television and Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Survey 62 (2008): 213-226.

“From Mary Cowden Clarke to Contemporary YA Novels: (Re)constructing Gender and Sexuality in Adaptations of As You Like It and Twelfth Night. ” Forthcoming in Borrowers and Lenders, 2015.œ

“Reviving Cowden Clarke: Rewriting Shakespeare’s Heroines in YA Fiction,” Shakespearean Echoes, Eds. Adam Hansen and Kevin Wetmore. New York: Palgrave, 2015. 21-39.