Scott Newstok, professor of English at Rhodes, has published a new book, How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Princeton University Press, 2020). The book grew out of the speech that Newstok delivered to the Rhodes Class of 2020 at their convocation four years ago.
Emma Smith, professor of English at Oxford University, praises the book as “an urgent account of Renaissance education and our own impoverished equivalent. Learned, pacey, full of witty observation, it is a brilliant enactment of its own central ideas about the importance of liberated thinking and the constitutive pleasures of rhetoric.”
Michael Witmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, calls How to Think like Shakespeare “something to treasure. The book lays out a case for Shakespeare’s vital connection to the lives we live today, opening the door to new ways of thinking and experiencing the world, which are essential to a life well lived.”
A faculty member since 2007, Newstok is founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment. Thanks to a generous bequest from the late Dr. Iris Annette Pearce, Rhodes supports a range of Shakespeare-related resources unique among American liberal arts colleges, including the recent artistic residency by visiting director Nick Hutchison.
A Chapter 16.org review of How to Think like Shakespeare is printed in the April 19th issue of The Commercial Appeal.
An interview with Newstok is published in the Feb. 23rd issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Why Students Should Think Like Shakespeare.”
View other interviews and reviews here.