About

Dr Saffron Vickers Walkling

I am a senior lecturer in English Literature at York St John University in the UK (2004-present). I previously taught for a total of five years at Shandong University in the People’s Republic of China (1993-95 and 2000-2003), and have Erasmus Teaching Mobility links with Poland.  I recently completed a part-time PhD  at the University of York, focussing on political non-Anglophone appropriations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the modern world: Hamlet and the Legacy of 1989.  My case studies include productions from Mainland China, Poland, the UK and Kuwait, beginning with China on the cusp of the new millennium.   I blog and travel, and there is nothing I love more than sitting in a cafe with a book or pen in hand drinking tea and eating cake. This blog is a personal record of my thoughts about how Shakespeare travels across cultural space in the contemporary world – an open academic reflective journal, if you will. Please feel free to quote me, and fully reference this blog, but be aware that it is not a peer-reviewed publication (if you are writing an essay!), and that much of it is work in progress. I have listed some of my formal publications below, many of which began life here. I am also a mother of three (one adult, two still small) and they are the best and most beautiful pieces of work I am ever likely to produce (even if I didn’t personally give birth to them all).

If you would like to contact me you can comment on my blog or email me at:

s.vickerswalkling@yorksj.ac.uk

Staff profile here

Research at York St John here

Publications include (hover over the titles for the links)

I have a chapter in the Palgrave Macmillan collection on Global Shakespeare Myths edited by Aneta Mancewicz and Alexa Huang (2018): “Denmark’s a Prison: Appropriating Modern Myths of Hamlet After 1989 in Lin Zhaohua’s Hamulaite and Jan Klata’s H.” (see Research at York St John, above, for access to copy of this chapter)

Full of noises: when “World Shakespeare” met the “Arab Spring” co-authored with Margaret Litvin (Hamlet’s Arab Journey)and Raphael Cormack in Shakespeare, Volume 12, Issue 3, 2016, Taylor and Francis. See also some of my early blog ideas on this on the Year of Shakespeare blog and also this blog. The final article is completely different.

(c) Teatr Polski Wrocław

Review of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (directed by Monika Pęcikiewicz) for the Polski Theatre (Wroclaw) at the Teatrul National “Marin Sorescu”, Craiova, Romania, 27 April 2010 in Shakespeare, Volume 8, Issue 4, 2012, Taylor and Francis. Also some initial blog ideas were explored here and here.

 

Review of Shakespeare and APA’s Macbeth: Leila and Ben – A Bloody History (directed by Lotfi Achour) and the company’s talkback at Re-making Shakespeare for the World Shakespeare Festival at the Northern Stage, Newcastle, UK, 14 July 2012 in Shakespeare, Volume 9, Issue 3, 2014, Taylor and Francis. (Global Shakespeares Special Issue, edited by Alexa Huang.)

 

Coriolanus, Edinburgh International Festival. Dir. Lin Zhaohua, 20-21 August 2013. A Chinese Coriolanus and British Reception: A Play Out of Context? in the Theatre Reviews section of Multicultural Shakespeares, Volume 11, Issue 26, 2014, De Gruyter. This also began life as a blog post.

 

My research was cited in the successful bid for York to become a UNESCO City of Media Arts. I organise events for York St John in the York International Shakespeare Festival.

In Twitter land I am @WorldShax

I am also on Academia.edu

I blog on non-Shakespeare related things at Saffron Muses.

This blog is dedicated to my family.

With thanks to my supervisors, Prof Bill Sherman & Dr Trev Broughton and my colleagues.

(I have referenced all images to their source which I believe is permitted for non-commercial use.)