Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar feels urgently contemporary in Rosa Joshi’s new production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival—one of America’s largest and longest-running theater festivals, now in its 90th season. Staged in partnership with Seattle’s upstart crow collective, the production explores the threat of autocracy, drawing on global histories of dictatorship.

Performed entirely by women and nonbinary actors, Joshi’s Julius Caesar offers new perspectives on a historically male-dominated political landscape. The result is a fresh reading of Shakespeare’s classic tale of power, loyalty, and betrayal.

In this episode, Joshi reflects on the production, the politics of performance, and why Shakespeare’s plays continue to illuminate moments of crisis.

>> Discover more about Julius Caesar at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published August 25, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Rosa Joshi (she/her) is a director, producer and educator.  She currently serves as Associate Artistic Director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Rosa’s directing work spans from Shakespeare to modern classics and contemporary plays.  Throughout her career she has created work independently through self-producing, and in 2006 she co-founded upstart crow collective a company that produces classical plays with diverse casts of women and non-binary people.  With upstart crow, she has directed King John, Bring Down the House, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, and Coriolanus. She is committed to creating ambitious productions of classical work featuring women, non-binary, and BIPOC artists.

As Interim Artistic Director of Northwest Asian American Theatre, Rosa produced a range of Asian American performances, including: A-Fest, an international performance festival; Traces, a world premiere multi-disciplinary, multi-media, international collaborative work. She was also a Resident Director and Artistic Director of the Second Company at New City Theater, where she directed and produced various classical and contemporary plays.

Rosa has been a faculty member at Seattle University and has also taught at The Old Globe University of San Diego Shiley Graduate Theatre Program, Hong Kong University, Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, and Cornish College for the Arts.

Rosa holds an MFA in Directing from the Yale School of Drama and a BA in Theatre and Psychology from Bucknell University.

Director Rosa Joshi on Julius Caesar Today

You may know Al Letson as a journalist—he’s the host of the popular investigative podcast Reveal. Before that, he created and hosted the public radio show State of the Re:Union. But Letson is also an actor, writer, playwright, and poet. His play Julius X: A Re-envisioning of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare kicks off Folger Theatre's 2025-26 season.

Julius X isn’t an adaptation of Julius Caesar — it’s a new play that borrows from Shakespeare’s language, characters, and plot to tell a different story. In Letson’s play, Julius X is a fictionalized version of Malcolm X. The play mixes lines from Shakespeare with Letson’s original poetry and songs. It expands the roles of Shakespeare’s female characters, as well as that of Cinna the poet.

Letson discusses the origin story of Julius X - a hint: it involves an audition, his lifelong love for Malcolm X, and the lessons he learned as an artist from Bill Moyers' series, The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published September 9, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Al Letson is the Peabody Award-winning host of Reveal. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at age 11 and, as a teenager, began rapping and producing hip-hop records. By the early 1990s, he had fallen in love with the theater, becoming a local actor and playwright, and soon discovered slam poetry. In 2000, Letson placed third in the National Poetry Slam and performed on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, which led him to write and perform one-man shows.

In Letson’s travels around the country, he realized that the America he was seeing on the news was far different from the one he was experiencing up close. In 2007, he competed in the Public Radio Talent Quest, where he pitched a show called State of the Re:Union that reflected the conversations he was having throughout the US. The show ran for five seasons and won a Peabody Award in 2014. In 2015, Letson helped create and launch Reveal, the nation’s first weekly investigative radio show, which has won two duPont Awards and three Peabody Awards and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has also hosted the podcast Errthang; written and developed several TV shows with major networks, including AMC+’s Moonhaven and Apple TV+’s Monarch; and DC Comics recently released his series Mister Terrific: Year One.

Al Letson on his play Julius X

Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were both born in 1564, rising from working-class origins finding success in the new world of the theater. But before Shakespeare transformed English drama, Marlowe had already done so—with Tamburlaine the Great and the introduction of blank verse to the stage.

As Stephen Greenblatt argues in his new biography, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, virtually everything in the Elizabethan theater can be seen as “pre- and post-Tamburlaine.” Shakespeare learned from Marlowe, borrowed from him, and even tried to outdo him. Beyond his theatrical innovation, Marlowe was a poet, provocateur, and likely spy whose turbulent life was cut tragically short.

In this episode, Greenblatt explores Marlowe’s audacious works, his entanglements with power and secrecy, and his lasting influence on Shakespeare and the stage.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published September 23, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He has written extensively on English Renaissance literature and acts as general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Norton Shakespeare. He is the author of fourteen books, including The Swerve, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and Will in the World, a Pulitzer Prize finalist.



Stephen Greenblatt on Christopher Marlowe

Shakespeare’s plays are filled with unforgettable women—but too often, their voices are cut short. Ophelia never gets to defend herself. Gertrude never explains her choices. Lady Anne surrenders to Richard III in silence.

In her new book, She Speaks: What Shakespeare’s Women Might Have Said, acclaimed actor Dame Harriet Walter imagines what those characters might tell us if given the chance. Through original poems, Walter reimagines moments of silence, expands on fleeting lines, and provides depth to women who were left without a final word.

Walter invites us to see Shakespeare’s plays in a new light—reconsidering how we understand his female characters, and how their voices might transform the stories we thought we knew.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published October 7, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Dame Harriet Walter, DBE, is one of Britain’s most esteemed Shakespearean actors, whose roles include Ophelia, Viola, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Brutus, King Henry IV, and Prospero, among others.. She has received a Laurence Olivier Award, as well as numerous nominations, including a Tony Award nomination, three Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Walter is also well-known for her appearances in Sense and Sensibility, Atonement, Downton Abbey, The Crown, Succession, Killing Eve, and Ted Lasso, among many other notable projects. In 2011, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to drama.

Harriet Walter: New Words for Shakespeare's Women

Long before Shakespeare became a household name, there was Richard Burbage. As the first actor to play Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, and King Lear, Burbage helped define what it meant to be a Shakespearean actor.

A commanding performer, he became one of early modern England’s first celebrities—celebrated for his emotional power and versatility, as well as his entrepreneurial savvy as an early theater owner.

In her new book "Richard Burbage and the Shakespearean Stage: A ‘Delightful Proteus,’" scholar Siobhan Keenan explores the actor’s remarkable career and his pivotal partnership with Shakespeare. Together, they transformed the English stage.

Siobhan Keenan is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at De Montfort University, UK, and the author of several books on early modern theatre history and performance culture, including Richard Burbage and the Shakespearean Stage: A ‘Delightful Proteus’ (2025), The Progresses, Processions and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625-1642 (2020), Acting Companies and their Plays in Shakespeare’s London (The Arden Shakespeare, 2014), and Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England (2002).

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published October 21, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Richard Burbage and the Shakespearean Stage

E572 | In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled a remarkable ethnographic and scholarly account of Greek life under Ottoman rule in his seminal Turcograecia. Though he never left his home in Tübingen, Crusius spent decades corresponding with a far-flung network of intermediaries, including the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Istanbul. He annotated books and manuscripts, and even interviewed Greek Orthodox alms-seekers who passed through Germany. In this episode, Richard Calis explores how Crusius’s fascination with the so-called Ottoman Greeks sheds light on broader early modern debates about cultural and religious difference and how Greek identity became entangled with orientalist perceptions of the Ottoman world. The Ottoman Turks, both omnipresent and strangely absent in Crusius’s research, emerge in unexpected places, including in his dreams.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2025/10/calis.html

Richard Calis is Assistant Professor in Intellectual History at Utrecht University. Most of his research revolves around questions of cultural exchange, and how people make sense of the world around them. He obtained his PhD from Princeton University and was a Research Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge before coming to Utrecht. His first book, The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius (1526-1607), was published in 2025 with Harvard University Press.

Maryam Patton is Assistant Professor of History at Wesleyan University. Her research interests span the cultural and intellectual history of the late medieval and early modern Ottoman Empire, the history and theories of time and temporality, and cross-cultural transmission in the Mediterranean world, among others. She received her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University and is preparing her first book on the Ottoman conception of time.

CREDITS

Episode No. 572
Release Date: 24 October 2025
Recording location: West Hartford, CT and Amsterdam, Netherlands
Sound production by Maryam Patton
Music: "Easy Lemon" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons
Bibliography and images courtesy of Richard Calis at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2025/10/calis.html



Martin Crusius and the Discovery of Ottoman Greece | Richard Calis

E573 | Comparisons are everywhere in American discussions of Middle East politics. As our guest, Perin Gürel, argues in a new book, this cultural impulse has political roots in the Cold War period. In this episode, we explore the origins of comparitivism through the lens of America's evolving relationship with Turkey and Iran over the course of the 20th century, focusing on how gender and race shaped the terms of the assymetrical relations between the US and other countries in the region. We discuss the "daddy issues" reflected in comparisons between the founding figures of the Republic of Turkey and Iran's monarchy, the changing image of Iran's empress on the global stage, and the ambivalent claims to whiteness and anti-imperialism that took shape in both countries over the course of the Cold War. Throughout the conversation, we return to a critique of comparison as a placeholder for knowledge and a political instrument wielded with varying degrees of success to further American foreign policy goals, and we reflect on how this American project has shaped how all of us conceptualize the region's major social and political questions today.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2025/10/gurel.html

	Perin Gürel is an associate professor of American Studies and the director of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She's the author of Türkiye, Iran, and the Politics of Comparison: America's Wife, America's Concubine (Cambridge University Press, 2025); The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey (Columbia University Press, 2017); and the forthcoming ecofantasy novel, Laleh and the Language of the Birds (Wildling Press, 2026).

Chris Gratien is Associate Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, explores the social and environmental transformation of the Adana region of Southern Turkey during the 19th and 20th century.

CREDITS

Episode No. 573
Release Date: 31 October 2025
Recording Location: University of Virginia
Sound production and music by Chris Gratien
Bibliography and images courtesy of Perin Gürel available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2025/10/gurel.html

Türkiye, Iran, and the Politics of Comparison | Perin Gürel

On this episode, Michael O. Emerson looks at the legacy of his and Christian Smith's 2000 book Divided By Faith, which was a landmark work on understanding race and religion in the United States. A quarter century after its publication, Emerson and Smith revisited the scholarship and the data to see what has changed and what reconciliations still remain out of reach. Today he shares the five biggest updates that were necessary for the new edition.

Michael O. Emerson on the 25th Anniversary of Divided by Faith - Episode 47 - The Side Comment

Imprisoned for nearly 20 years by her cousin Queen Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, fought her battles through words, sending and receiving coded letters hidden in books, garments, and even beer barrels.

Historian Jade Scott, of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, has uncovered the human and political depths behind Mary’s captivity through 57 recently decrypted letters, coded missives that reveal her as a strategist, an adept diplomat, and a woman navigating the perilous politics of Elizabethan England.

In her new book, Captive Queen: The Decrypted History of Mary, Queen of Scots, Scott draws on these newly decoded letters to illuminate Mary’s time in captivity, her alliances and betrayals, and the intricate game of espionage that ultimately led to her execution.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published November 4, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Jade Scott, PhD, is a historian specializing in Mary, Queen of Scots and is an expert on her letters. She is a lecturer in historical linguistics at the University of Glasgow and an associate fellow of the Royal Historical Society, researching early modern Scottish women and their correspondence. Fascinated by Mary since she was a child, Jade was contacted by the DECRYPT Project to consult on the translations of Mary’s newly-decoded letters, which led to the writing of Captive Queen. Jade lives in Glasgow.

Mary, Queen of Scots, with Jade Scott

In this special episode, the members of the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Subcommittee introduce themselves and discuss the field of digital medieval studies. Participants: Hannah Busch, Nathan Daniels, Tessa Gengnagel, James Harr III, Aylin Malcolm, Caitlin Postal, Daniela Schulz.

Music credits: Intro music by TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility” (CC BY 4.0), additional music by Random Mind, “King's Feast” (CC0), outro music by Random Mind, “The Bard's Tale” (CC0).

Recorded 30 November 2020. Edited by Tessa Gengnagel.

Special Episode: Introduction

A podcast on medieval studies in the digital world, hosted by the early-career scholars of the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Committee. 

This account features the first season of Coding Codices and is no longer being updated. For more episodes, transcripts, and other resources, check out our website at https://podcast.digitalmedievalist.org.

Special Episode: Introduction

Coding Codices: A Digital Medievalist Podcast