SoS #31 | Edward Wilson-Lee: Shakespeare, Books, Water, Africa, and the New World

Thomas Dabbs speaks with Edward Wilson-Lee of Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. Wilson-Lee is the author of “Shakespeare in Swahililand,” a study of how Shakespearean plays made their way into East Africa. He is also the author of “The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books,” which examines the life of Columbus’s son, Hernando Colón, and Hernando’s dream of a library that held universal knowledge. This work is supplemented with another book on Colón’s catalogue, a collaboration with José María Pérez Fernández entitled “Hernando Colón’s New World of Books: Towards a Cartography of Knowledge.” Wilson-Lee also has another book that will appear in August 2022, entitled “A History of Water, being an account of a murder, an epic, and two vision of global history.”
00:00:00 - Intro

00:03:41 - Formative years, East Africa, books and adventure

00:07:04 - A History of Water

00:16:15 - Shakespeare in Swahililand

00:32:10 - The travels of translation

00:39:50 - Shakespeare for the people, Shakespearean adaptation

00:45:30 - Hernando Colón and preserving knowledge

00:56:20 - The found book and ordering knowledge

01:19:28 - Scholarship in narrative form; the wandering scholar

01:15:50 - Japanese translation and closing remarks