Associate professor talks Shakespeare on Academic Minute

Thomas Olsen, associate professor in the English department at SUNY New Paltz, was featured on the nationally syndicated educational radio program “The Academic Minute,” in an April 22 broadcast.

Olsen spoke about William Shakespeare and how the author remixed others’ work to create his masterpieces.

“In my years of studying, teaching and writing about Shakespeare I have become more and more interested in how he ransacked the literature of his age, stealing storylines and characters from other authors, and remaking their works,” Olsen said. “He was a Renaissance “remix artist”—perhaps the greatest ever.”

Olsen joined the faculty at SUNY New Paltz in 1997. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Shakespeare and in English literature, especially of the early modern period. He has a particular interest in Shakespeare’s adaptations of source stories, as well as in the other side of of that process: the ways that later writers and other artists have adapted and re-worked Shakespeare.

To listen to Obach’s “Academic Minute” in its entirety, visit http://academicminute.org/2016/04/thomas-olsen-suny-new-paltz-shakespeare-and-the-art-of-the-remix/.

About “The Academic Minute”
“The Academic Minute” is an educationally focused radio segment produced by WAMC in Albany, N.Y., a National Public Radio member station. The show features an array of faculty from colleges and universities across the country discussing the unique, high-impact aspects of their research. The program airs every weekday and is run multiple times during the day on about 50 different member stations across the National Public Radio spectrum. For more information, visit http://academicminute.org/.