The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP) is pleased to have added a new RSS feed to the site. The RSS feed, powered by Posterous, allows for posting of all CASP-related news on a timely basis, including updates to the site, new site features, news about various CASP partnerships and undertakings. Also, the news site has a unique auto-update feature on a secondary news stream carrying global news relating to the search terms, Canada, Canadian, and Shakespeare. This feature allows site-users to access quickly information that’s in the news about all things Canadian and Shakespearean.

CASP gratefully acknowledges the design and advisory work of Arni Mikelsons at Northern Village in facilitating the launch of this new RSS feed. Thanks too to Gordon Auld for his programming insights.

This launch follows on a year’s work to establish a news feed protocol that is workable. In that time a number of items have been missed and these will be more fully posted in the coming weeks. Among these items are the following:

1. CASP welcomes Brazilian Doctoral (ABD) student Erika Vieira (Belo Horizonte) to its offices for a year of study and work on her doctoral dissertation (September 2010). Ms. Vieira is working on a comparative literature thesis entitled Hamlet’s Afterlives: Adaptation and Appropriation in Readings of the Play.

2. CASP implements bug fixes to the literacy game ‘Speare. Many thanks to lead programmer Brad Eccles for the work in 2010 to make these fixes.

3. CASP Director Daniel Fischlin and Sanders Portrait owner Lloyd Sullivan sign in 2009  with Westwood Creative Artists for a co-written book on the Sanders Portrait and the struggle to determine its authenticity.

4. CASP announces new work on the Interactive Folio edition of Romeo and Juliet, the most media-rich and complete online learning resource for the play currently available.

5. CASP Director Daniel Fischlin did interviews and provided research support for two graduate research projects, one at the MA level the other at the PhD level (Stacey Wheal, Univ. of Western Ontario and David Meurer, York University). As a result CASP’s work is  featured in both their dissertations.

6. CASP Director Daniel Fischlin served as an external reviewer on two doctoral dissertations at the University of Toronto in 2009 and 2010 respectively. Both dissertations by Suddhaseel Sen ( The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Study of Cross-Cultural Adaptations into Opera and Film) and James McKinnon (The Dramaturgy of Appropriation: How Canadian Playwrights Use and Abuse Shakespeare and Chekhov), feature research associated with the CASP site.    

7. CASP’s research was featured in a feature-length article that appeared in the  London Sunday Times Culture Magazine, 22.03.09.

8. CASP’s research was featured in a feature-length article by James Adams that appeared in the Globe and Mail, April 11, 2009.

9. CASP’s research was featured in an online feature column by Michael Best in the Shakespeare Newsletter on “Electronic Shakespeares.”

 10. CASP’s research was featured in an online feature Initiatives Promote Video Games in Education by Nathalie Caron in Game Forward July 14, 2009.

 11. In the summer of 2009 CASP Director Daniel Fischlin negotiates the  contract between Lloyd Sullivan and the Canadian War Museum for loan of the Sanders portrait in the Fall of 2009 for the conference Wartime Shakespeare in a Global Context.

 12. CASP continued to track new leads and to develop new sub-pages to the site, including recent work done by a graduate class taught by Daniel Fischlin in Winter 2010. One of these focuses on Shakespeare and Popular Music, a student work-in-progress associated with  the Graduate Colloquium that CASP helped sponsor in the Fall of  2010 on Shakespeare and Popular Music. CASP was pleased to welcome Professor Adam Hansen, author of Shakespeare and Popular Music as a keynote speaker.

 13. CASP remains in contact with numerous primary and secondary school teachers worldwide (most recently in Australia and the U.S.) who use the site (especially the ‘Speare portion of the site) as a teaching aid and resource. We encourage end-users to remain in touch with ideas for improvements, supplements, and new site features.

14. CASP Director Daniel Fischlin edited a special issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriatiion on Canadian Shakespeares (3.1 Fall/Winter 2007) featuring new research  by Mark Fortier, Mark McCutcheon, Jennifer Drouin, Don Moore, Deanne Williams, Ann Wilson, Rod Carley,  Judith Thompson, and Leanore Lieblein.