Hannah Elizabeth Bowling is an alumna of Abilene Christian University (ACU) and doctoral candidate and instructor of record in Texas A&M University's English department. Her dissertation examines African diasporic and continental adaptations of Shakespeare as articulations of the Black experience. Through development of the genre-race paradigm, she employs historical, cultural, performance-based, and textual methodologies to read the dramatic, cinematic, and narrative works of Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Joe de Graft, Shakirah Bourne, Caryl Philips, Margo J Hendricks, and others. Through a focus on genre, “‘So base a hue? A beauteous blossom, sure’: Race & Identity in Shakespearean Performance from the Early Modern to the Postmodern” she engages with Black storytelling as community-building, -sustaining, and -withholding praxis.
She has presented at major national and international conferences such as the Global Digital Humanities (DH) Symposium, the International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS), and the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States Conference (MELUS). Sponsors of her work include the Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR), the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute (RESI), the Aggie Research Program (ARP), and the Center for Integrated Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL). At this time, she and her interdisciplinary team of student researchers are preparing for the publication of the digital project that accompanies her dissertation: Blackspeare. This DH project collates educational material for early-career scholars invested in teaching Shakespeare and his afterlives through a premodern critical race theoretical framework in the format of an open-access educational resource (OER).
