Katherine Rowe, professor of English at Bryn Mawr College, will give a presentation, “A Walking Guide to Virtual Shakespeare,” on Wednesday, October 23, 2–3 p.m., in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library, University Park. In her talk Rowe will explore the rhetoric of scholarly walking in the context of a small set of virtual Shakespearean locales—thereby creating a distinctive motor connection to the design of these virtual environments.

Rowe has a Ph.D. from Harvard and teaches and writes about literature and media change. Trained as a Shakespeare scholar, she turned her attention to questions of media history and adaptation. Her courses explore the history of reading, writing and performance, from the Renaissance to the digital age. Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Department of Education support her work in the digital humanities. She is the associate editor of the Cambridge World Shakespeare Online, a principle investigator for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s F21 Project and a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. She has longstanding interests in faculty development, undergraduate research and curricular innovation. Rowe is also cofounder of Luminary Digital Media, a small commercial publisher of next-generation mobile reading experiences, including Shakespeare’s “The Tempest for iPad.”

The program is sponsored by the Penn State University Libraries’ Colloquia Committee. It is part of International Open Access Week, October 21-27, now in its 8th year. Made possible by the Internet and the consent of the author or copyright holder, open access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Radically changing the distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature, open access offers free and unrestricted access by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.

For more information or if you anticipate needing accessibility accommodations or have questions about the physical access provided, please contact Patricia Hswe at phswe@psu.edu or Linda Friend at lxf5@psu.edu or call 814-867-3702, during normal business hours.